Reported here. William Patry, veteran copyright lawyer, author of Patry on Copyright, and now Google in-house lawyer, apparently realizes how messed up copyright law is:
I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
Inexplicably, he still believes copyright is “essential” in “certain doses.”
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Ok lets not get ahead of ourselves here- copyright is ESSENTIAL as the lawyer claims because in simple terms if we had no copyright law your own research and innovation would be worth nothing and you will lose the incentive to venture out there and risk your wealth, time and effort if anyone could just steal the idea….
“Ok lets not get ahead of ourselves here- copyright is ESSENTIAL as the lawyer claims because in simple terms if we had no copyright law your own research and innovation would be worth nothing and you will lose the incentive to venture out there and risk your wealth, time and effort if anyone could just steal the idea….”
Or maybe copying others’ *ideas* (and/or building upon them) is not equivalent to property theft and maybe the fact that the world is full of everday examples of people “stealing” *ideas* from others means that a world without any IP would not be a world without research and innovation.
To say that any work would be worthless if not for the state granted monopoly on redistribution is just unfounded.
Either you assume that there is no amount of entrepreneurial experimentation that would find other capital structures to meet the demand. Which I don’t really see how one could think.
Or you assume that copyright stops the market from being flooded with competing, lower priced, goods thus keeping supply low, with resulting higher prices. Maybe we could make a case for how the those monopolies increase the value of investments and thus directs capital away from other investments. But then we have to justify why current investments are preferable to those other investments…
I never claimed that people can’t build on other’s ideas but what i say there has to be a line somewhere- maybe not determined by the government but more so the courts- now you say that any idea should be there to be used – then please tell me what would be your incentive as an entrepreneur when you come up with an idea and someone just copies it after all your hard work- lets not forget current copyright laws set a time limit to allow the person who came up with the idea to benefit while at the same time allowing others to build on the idea and being able to use it after the time limit expires.
Now i know we are all for liberty here but liberty also means enjoying the fruits of your labor- you sound like a socialist when you claim that these ideas and their benefits have to be shared!
Haas:
“Now i know we are all for liberty here but liberty also means enjoying the fruits of your labor- you sound like a socialist when you claim that these ideas and their benefits have to be shared!”
No.
You come from a different (wrong..hehe) perspective on property and value. You say that I should get benefits for things because I put work in them. But you don’t get profits for any work you do , other people must value it. What I try to say that the market will (and has) sort it out how people get paid for purely intellectual work. For example we would see shorter continuation novels instead of a heavy and long one.
Also the notion of intellectual property as we know it today is maybe 200 years old and was a statist invention. Any alarm bells ringing?
If someone owned a private city and rented land and air space to WalMart in it and it was economical to do so, the owner (landlord) could give a contract (for a certain period of time) to WalMart and prohibit other companies in the city from using WalMart’s trade-mark, therefore a free market copyright.
Or the owner in the private city might just own the air space and therefore give a contract, being the airlord.
The matter of trademark is much simpler than so. There is no reason to view it any different from fraud. A trademark infringement is (or should be considered) committed against the customer, not the other user of the trademark.
Haas “Now i know we are all for liberty here but liberty also means enjoying the fruits of your labor- you sound like a socialist when you claim that these ideas and their benefits have to be shared!”
I am sorry to tell you, but you seem to rely on statist/collectivistic “logic”: Your argument sounds as if you would like to get some people payed for forcing “their” ideas into the heads of others and then demanding money from these forced on people for having these ideas in their minds and using their own (!) resources in making them real. Thats unjust and unfair and seems like you are trying to legitimate coercion…
This sounds like you are some sort of leftist…
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