Comment Re:Remove the ancient laws, or at least update'em. (Score 2) 316
Copyright laws are not designed with individual inventors or artists in mind, but to promote innovation from large corporations. It is a trivial fact that most of the cost of producing new products go to R&D rather than production.
Take the issue of AIDS-medicine for instance. A norwegian medical company (whose name escapes me for the moment) spent enormous amounts of money on research to find a decent medicine to suppress the development of HIV into AIDS, but the actual medicine itself is relatively cheap. If they didn't get a patent on the medicine any Tom, Dick and Harry could create this medicine for production-cost alone, while the innovators would have to pay the whole cost of research.
Now, I don't think anyone would disagree that we want the medicine spread as much as possible, as cheaply as possible. But the point here is that if the company knew in advance that once they had spent millions on developing this medicine anyone would be able to produce it cheaply, then they simply wouldn't have spent those money on research, as the whole project would have cost them tremendous amounts of money. And corporations exist to make money. If they don't, they go bust.
So, conclusion: I don't particularily like copyright-laws, but if we remove them completely it will reduce innovation from large corporations, and in the long run this is not something we'll want.
Take the issue of AIDS-medicine for instance. A norwegian medical company (whose name escapes me for the moment) spent enormous amounts of money on research to find a decent medicine to suppress the development of HIV into AIDS, but the actual medicine itself is relatively cheap. If they didn't get a patent on the medicine any Tom, Dick and Harry could create this medicine for production-cost alone, while the innovators would have to pay the whole cost of research.
Now, I don't think anyone would disagree that we want the medicine spread as much as possible, as cheaply as possible. But the point here is that if the company knew in advance that once they had spent millions on developing this medicine anyone would be able to produce it cheaply, then they simply wouldn't have spent those money on research, as the whole project would have cost them tremendous amounts of money. And corporations exist to make money. If they don't, they go bust.
So, conclusion: I don't particularily like copyright-laws, but if we remove them completely it will reduce innovation from large corporations, and in the long run this is not something we'll want.
