"And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?"

Um, are you aware that Hollywood is in fact in California because the film industry moved there to avoid paying the license fees for Edison? Those great protectors of "intellectual output" have billions of dollars only because they were bloody leeches, pirates, if you like, and used someone else's "intellecual output" for free? (Not to mention that Edison himself was blatantly stealing other people's "intellectual output" and patenting it under his name...)

Are you also aware that the copyright in its first incarnation was *not* protecting the artists? It was protecting the printer houses in England and had absolutely nothing to do with the advancements of the arts.

By the way, I believe the furtherment of the arts would get a significant boost by the sheer elimination of maybe 99% of those $100M+ Hollywood blockbusters.

"Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator."

Is that so? Walt Disney created a cartoon mouse. So how does the fact that Disney, Inc. owns the copyright on the Mickey Mouse keyring exactly helps Walther Disney's rotten corpse to contribute and to make it a viable project today?

"You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right?"

Well, I believe that most of the fabric that those evil pirates use to steal the intellectual property of those starving Hollywood studios is FOSS. There are a few very high quality commercial programs and there are a few very high quality FOSS programs. Then there's an enormous amount of crap FOSS and and equal amount of equally crap commercial code. The difference is that crap FOSS remains there and the few bits that are worth using in other projects is available. Crap commercial code just dies and doesn't have a trace.

Copyright has never been intended to protect the artist or further the art. It was intended to protect the investors' investment in the artist. Most of the time copyright is not owned by the artist, it is owned by a corporate entity that has only one art in mind: the art of making money. The artist is only interesting for the corporate entity as long as they can use his/her output to make more money. If (s)he creates the greatest piece of art ever created but it's not low-brow enough to be appealing to the mass market (see Hollywood blockbusters), the artist can drop dead.

When a taxpayer funded research group wants to publish, they *pay* (from your tax dollars) the publisher of the journal for the publication of their results (that were, again, paid by your tax dollars) and then they sign the copyright over to the publisher. Thus a private entity, with nothing to do with research, obtained the exclusive right to results of a publicly founded process *and* they were paid from the public purse to do so... Clever scheme. Copyright is the way!

No wonder corporations are a helluva lot more pro copyright than artists themselves.

Quick question, though: I have a box full of old VHS tapes. Can I go to a DVD store and exchange them, for the nominal cost of the polycarbonate disc, to DVDs? After all, I have already paid the license fee on them, haven't I. For some strange reason the local DVD store looked at me when I tried it as if I was a mental retard. I don't understand it, really. I have a copy, I just want to exchange it to an other copy of better quality, offering the cost of the material. I would not believe in my wildest dream that the entertainment industry, the greatest protectors of intellectual property would try to make me pay for the same license multiple times? I mean, that would be, like, stealing, right?

Police in Australia just have been empowered to secretly enter a suspect's home *and* secretly enter to anybody's home is that helps them in observing the suspect. So basically they can get into your house, sniff around and go, and if you accidentally find out, they can tell you that they were looking at John Doe who looked very suspicious, but later turned out that he was not a terrorist miniaturised by space aliens, but a terracotta garden gnome. Sorry about the inconvenience, and if you could give all the bugs we planted in your house, that'd be great, in these economic times every penny counts...

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
[Roosevelt]

That guy must have known something...

Um, he was talking about "marginal cost". Look it up. It contains both the production cost and the reproduction cost.

No. Economy is not artificial scarcity. I pay you to polish my shoes. Where's the scarcity? Nowhere. Whether a resource is scarce or not (among other factors) determines the price people are willing to pay for it. Here's where copyright law comes into the picture.

If you want to sell me a bicycle for $10,000, chances are I'm not going to buy it. However, if you manage to pay the politicians so that they ban cars, aeroplanes and the back of domesticated animals as means of transportation, then you form a cartel with the other bicycle manufacturers and decide that a bycicle will cost at least $10,000 *and* that anybody who attempts to make a copy of your bycicle will be burned alive in the next festive autodafe, then you managed to put yourself into the shoes of the copyright industry.

Copyright is nothing more than a limited term artificial monopoly to distort the market to the benefit of the creator in the hope that that would be an incentive for the creator to create more, for the (and here's the important part, listen very carefully!) benefit of *society*. Today copyright is pretty much unlimited, thus has nothing to do with the creator (when someone is dead for almost a century, it's hardly reasonable to expect them to come up with their Magnum Opus). Furthermore, it is very questionable whether the RIAA/MPAA controlling the music and film industry is actually beneficial to society. Most Hollywood films are definiteley mentally damaging to society, IMHO.

Nevertheless, the important points are that 1) Copyright is for the benefit of the people and not for the creator or the middleman and 2) Copyright is not a law of nature but a law of men, that we, the people, created because we felt that at the time it was in our benefit. When we feel that it does not serve our collective purpose any more, we can repeal it. That's the theory, anyway...

"there is a loss of potential income."

The key word is "potential".

Using the classic example, the horse buggy makers could not sue the automotive industry for loss of potential income. Indeed, chances are that if the automobil had not been invented, they would have had more income. Unfortunately (for them), the automobile was indeed invented. Tough.

Please do not forget that you have a right to create a business venture but there is no inherent right to make a profit. If you can sell your wares to the people at a price they are willing to pay and you can still make a profit, good on you. If you can't, well, bad luck. You can't really go around with a machine gun shooting everyone who's not willing to buy your stuff for the price you set.

When you buy a lottery ticket, there's a huge potential income. Have you tried to sue your state lottery agency for their wrong choice of numbers causing you not to realise your $57 million jackpot potential income?

"Theaters, cheaper theaters, PPV, DVD, NetFlix, Redbox, cable, bargin bins, broadcast television (with ads). All are efforts to "find a happy medium" and a price point people are willing to pay."

And now there's a new one: $30/month for broadband and all the movies/music you want. So it seems that it all goes according to plan. What's the fuss?

"with a third category of "foreign films hacked to ribbons by American studios" also applicable."

Why would you want to watch the Americanised version if you could see the original?

"to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate."

I thought we were talking about copyright, an artificial monopoly arrangement, a concept that's kind of orthogonal to the "free market".

> Didn't anyone ever wonder why the RIAA never went after someone who has enough money to actually defend himself in court?

For the same reason the local mob does not try to get protection money from the pub that's a den for soldiers of fortune on a holiday between two missions somewhere in Africa... Or, for the same reason the schoolyard bully is not picking on that kid who's been on the school's boxing team for a few years.

Yes, you can do that. So what? Just because *you* can use free code and if you ar so clever that you can make something that people want, you get your money. Until someone implements your idea (what your program does, not *how* it does it), releases the source and then you are dead in the water, because everybody else is going to improve *his* program, while you stand alone with your secrets.

That is called competition, which is a Good Thing. Copyright, on the other hand, is a (government granted) monopoly, which is a Bad Thing.

Copyright does not eliminate trade secrets (that is what you were talking about), copyright is on top of trade secrets. If copyright would be no more, you could try to fall back to trade secrets - that's fine. We'd still be *much* better off without copyright (and patents, for that matter).