So either I wasn’t serious or I’m not a person. I guess I buy that.
If I had spent my life waking up every morning and stabbing my leg with a fork, there would be two ways I could go. 1) I could say, “Well, it’s precedent, so I’d better continue,” or 2) I could say, “I have a lot of data on this now, and the data says this is painful and unproductive, so I’m going to stop.” Precedent means there is a history to study, not a reason to do anything.
Fair use has no hard-and-fast rules that can be relied upon and puts the burden on the fair user, meaning that fair use exists only for those who are willing to pay lawyers to back up fair use. It’s a broken system.
You just don’t see there being a problem right now that’s worse than all of these things you can imagine happening if things were different.
Copyright is a limitation on freedom of expression. That limitation has to be justified and that justification has to be in terms of benefit to the public. You can’t justify it with a bunch of “what ifs.”
In short: The argument that private enterprise preserving things for their own profit is of more benefit to the public than the public having free access to them is perverse. The argument that corporations will simply skirt rules is an argument that we ought to throw up our hands and have no laws because people will just keep finding loopholes so what’s the point. And the idea that any change to copyright would penalize any business is absurd since copyright is a privilege that exists for the public good. And no, you don’t dick over amateur photographers by changing the terms of copyright.
