[ExI] Pirate Party

[Kaj Sotala]

On Jan 14, 2008 8:49 PM,  <odellndc at aol.com> wrote:
> taxpayer and the courts. A better system would be for inventors--who
> naturally have a large incentive, when there is demand for their product but
> high contract enforcement costs--to evolve technologies that prevent
> contract violation. Barbed wire did this for land use control (better
> excludability); the movie, music, and software industries would be much
> better served by investing in technologies to restrict their products to
> only licensed users--rather than suing their customers and calling them!

Technologies which will never work. If a customer can replay a
product, he can also make a copy of it. (This is most trivially seen
in the case of music: if you can hear it from your speakers, then you
can always take a microphone and record that sound to another system,
no matter what the protections on the original system.)

Copyright laws don't really work in the Internet era, nor are they
needed. There are plenty of ways for artists to make their living even
without copyright, and even if they weren't, open source and other
similar movements have shown that people these days have enough time
to create art and useful products even without being paid for it. It's
time we started dismantling the copyright system.


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