I used to have long, long discussions about copyright on the Tolkien Usenet newsgroups back in the day. My position at the time was that our existing copyright laws absolutely need to be reformed, both to address the new realities of the internet and to undo the ceaseless erosion of the public domain by Disney and others over the past century. But, I argued, it was essential for the sake of artists that we continue to obey the existing laws until a good replacement was enacted.
I'm not sure where exactly I stand these days, but I've begun to think that it doesn't matter: that my generation (and the ones before) have already lost our opportunity to have a say in what comes next. By doing absolutely nothing to address the issue (and by allowing major corporations to actively fight any change), we've left the next generation down to invent their own copyright ethics from scratch and allowed those ethics to become firmly entrenched in their culture. Unsurprisingly, the ethics developed by a bunch of teenagers is awfully shortsighted in many ways and I'm not especially happy with their new reality, but at least its glaring flaws are different than the glaring flaws of our present system.
So perhaps we're entering a future where absolutely everything is essentially CC-BY and artists will only make a living via tools like Kickstarter, Unglue.it, and PayPal donation buttons. I have no idea how it's going to work out. But as I said, I'm not sure that I get to have any input at this point, either.
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I'm not sure where exactly I stand these days, but I've begun to think that it doesn't matter: that my generation (and the ones before) have already lost our opportunity to have a say in what comes next. By doing absolutely nothing to address the issue (and by allowing major corporations to actively fight any change), we've left the next generation down to invent their own copyright ethics from scratch and allowed those ethics to become firmly entrenched in their culture. Unsurprisingly, the ethics developed by a bunch of teenagers is awfully shortsighted in many ways and I'm not especially happy with their new reality, but at least its glaring flaws are different than the glaring flaws of our present system.
So perhaps we're entering a future where absolutely everything is essentially CC-BY and artists will only make a living via tools like Kickstarter, Unglue.it, and PayPal donation buttons. I have no idea how it's going to work out. But as I said, I'm not sure that I get to have any input at this point, either.
Oh, and one of the best discussions of all this that I've seen anywhere was Jonathan Coulton's essay a while back. Good points there.