Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
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>| I have decided to end the blog, after doing around 800 postings over about 4
>| years.
>|
>| [...]
>|
>| 2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing
>|
>| This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of
>| the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I
>| regard myself as a centrist. 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.
> `----
>
> http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html
>
> Larry Lessig too quit his work on copyrights after witnessing corruption, which
> he now fights. Appeneded below are recent examples that show how brutal and
> corrupt it is.
>
The problem with trying to be "centrist" is that it assumes that those
to the right of you, and those to the left of you, will move neither
further away nor closer together except at precisely the same modulus
rate.
In reality, politics almost never plays this way, and issues like
copyright are 99% driven by short-term political interests. They get
dressed up for long-term, but they're anything but.
--
| mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
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