[pp.int.general] Protest certain musicians?

[Félix Robles]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 7:37 PM, Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet) <
rick at piratpartiet.se> wrote:

>
> > So I think, we have to find a balance between free access for everbody
> > to everything and the author's right. Here we are always taking about
> > consumers rights. What rights do we want to grant to authors?
> >
> Here is where you walk astray.
>
> The balance of copyright is not, and was never, between an author's
> right and something else. Never. Ever.
>
> Copyright is a balance between the public's interest in having access to
> culture, and the SAME PUBLIC's interest in having new works created. The
> purpose of copyright is to culturally maximize society. (This is even
> written explicitly in the US Constitution, which words the purpose of
> copyright as "...to promote the progress of science and the useful
> arts...".)
>
> The MEANS of doing so has been to grant a limited monopoly to the author
> or composer, a monopoly which has been sold to a publisher or other
> parasitic middleman.
>
> Overall, the theory that copyright is needed as an incentive to create
> has been thoroughly debunked in the last 10 years of debate, as
> evidenced by, say, Wikipedia and GNU/Linux, not to mention the fact that
> 90% of music on P2P networks is unsigned. Or look at the millions of
> photos on Flickr where people have denounced their ALREADY-AWARDED
> monopoly. People create not because of copyright, but despite copyright.
>
> The only valid defense left for the monopoly is to protect heavy
> investments in culture that otherwise wouldn't have happened. Those
> three last words are key: any monopoly granted to an effect in society
> that would have occurred anyway becomes a hinder for creativity and/or
> innovation down the road, so the important thing here is to see what
> wouldn't be invested in if it were not for copyright.
>
> Multimillion dollar movies out of Hollywood and computer games come to
> mind.
>
> So the next question would be, when those investment decisions are made,
> what are their ROI horizons? At what time from publication is further
> copyright irrelevant to their decision?
>
> It turns out that most investments are calculating for an ROI of less
> than a year. Five years of *commercial *copyright is therefore actually
> overly generous to rightsholders, but I believe it is a decent stake in
> the ground.
>
> For more elaboration, see my recent open letter to the music industry,
> here:
>
>
> http://english.rickfalkvinge.se/2009/10/20/open-letter-to-the-music-industry/
>
>
And, of course, most non-profit uses of copyrighted material should be
unregulated. Included copying.
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