Yes! For example, if the courts had their way in the 20s, every copy of the classic and influential silent horror movie Nosferatu would have been destroyed for copyright violation. If the government says a certain work can’t exist because it violates copyright, what is this if not state-authorized censorship? We need to find a way to make copyright purely a matter of royalties–if you don’t get clearance to use someone else’s characters/story/music/etc., maybe you have to pay a huge chunk of the profits on your copyright-violating work (and maybe you have to charge people some minimum price to see your work, comparable to the price of the work you copied from, so you can’t copy someone’s work and then distribute it for free). But the government should not be in the business of making it illegal for your copyright-violating work to exist at all, such works may have genuine artistic value.
As the debate on copyright becomes ever more feverish, the time has come to advocate it’s abolition.
The only way to restrict the abuse of this perverse and anachronistic legal precept is to get rid of it. At it’s heart is a absurd and unnatural concept: that one can own ideas.
We cant have copyright and the internet coexist in their current forms, one has to change to accomodate the other. That has to be copryright and that change has to be it’s death.
It sounds radical but on close examination it is perfectly reasonable.
Kill IP, kill copyright and allow the internet to flourish.
Shia LaBeouf – Freedom Fighter
That copyright law starts with the axiom that one can not own an idea and then proceeds to the undercut that very premise, illustrates its absurdity.
Pray tell, just what is an expression of an idea if not an idea itself? You cannot lay claim to such abstracts.
You cannot own a song anymore than you can own a single musical note.
You cannot own an image any more than you can own the sunset.
Just because an industry has grown up around copyright and some people make money off of it is no argument in favour of the concept: similarly, one could have argued abolitioning slavery would put farmers out of business.
Artists will continue to create regardless of the form of remuneration. In fact I would say that it is copyright itself that stifles the creative fields.
Copyright cannot be enforced without fundamentally changing the Internet. Rewiring and restricting the internet is what they seek to do and thats the price you will pay by accepting IP.
Copyright is not about owning ideas. Copyright is about owning an expression of an idea. In fact, one basic principle of copyright law is that ideas are not protected. In order to be protected, the creator must create a unique expression of an idea. This takes time and resources. Without copyright, there would not be an incentive to create. Many of our greatest artists never would have had the chance to make their art had it not been for the value given by copyright. Further, copyright allows plenty of room for expression by others through fair use.
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