Comment by JuniperMesos
12 hours ago
Copyright law is hundreds of years old and originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
It was created when there was a scarcity of content, so state violence was used to encourage production of content.
But now we don't live in the age of scarcity of content. On the contrary, content creators are competing for a possibility to get into consumers' attention span and push their agenda (ads). Everything has changed.
Removing all copyright restriction will not decrease the amount of content available for a person through their lifetime even a few percent.
> originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.
We agree that that was its initial stated intention.
However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").
The world has changed substantially since the 1710 Statue of Anne; there's a thousand things that you could call the modern-day equivalent of mechanically printing a book, with myriad capital and operating costs and availability. Many ways an independent author or artist can publish their work are extremely cheap and effective. I'm relatively anti-copyright, but that doesn't mean that everyone currently benefiting from copyright law is rent-seeking in an exploitive way.