[p2p-research] Fwd: [fcforum] Fw: iPad DRM is a dangerous step backward. Sign the petition!

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/5/10, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 08:25:08 AM -0500, Ryan Lanham (rlanham1963 at gmail.com) wrote:
>

>  > Totally agreed.  Because abundance will grow and people will be
>  > treated fairly.  But frankly, if we hold at 75 years, in a matter of
>  > a century or less, it will be largely irrelevant.  There will be so
>  > much public domain material, the rest will be deeply value
>  > compromised.

>  I think you're quite underestimating this one issue. Just think to
>  textbooks. In that field, having the last 75 years of production
>  potentially all locked by copyright is just as bad as if copyright
>  were eternal.
>
>  If copyright today lasted 10 years, it would still be possible to
>  build a complete, decent textbooks corpus for electronic or software
>  engineering ONLY with 10+ years old titles in the public domain. You
>  wouldn't study the state of the art, but you'd still learn enough to
>  justify your effort.
>
>  It is simply impossible to do the same thing using only 75+ old
>  titles, and it will be just as impossible in 2100, 2200 etc..

That's quite true in the case of anything time-sensitive.
Contemporary music, art and literature that are the product of the
actual living culture we exist in today would be off-limits to the
public domain.  If the public domain were restricted to the creations
of people 75 years dead, Free and Open culture people would be
restricted to living in the Roaring 20s  and saying "Ha cha cha cha!"
Not that that would be a terrible thing, maybe, but it would certainly
set us apart from the rest of society.

Indeed, the whole point of the 75-year copyright duration, as with the
shorter duration of patents, is to keep stuff proprietary until it's
effectively useless as a source of competition.  In the case of
patents, a 14-year duration is sufficient to keep the current
generation of industrial technology under lockdown.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com/
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html