[ExI] Pirate Party

[odellndc at aol.com]

 Copyrights are contract enforcement subsidies from the government. When a consumer buys something that was invented, he has either explicitly or implicitly entered into a contract with the inventor, which in all likelihood imposes a non-reproducibility burden on the user. However, duplication in most media is cheap, whereas enforcing all contracts on all users is very expensive. Copyright laws pass these enforcement costs to the 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 thieves. (Which they are not). At least, however, copyright protection is constitutional since it is explicitly mentioned.



 --Odell


 

-----Original Message-----
From: hkhenson <hkhenson at rogers.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Mon, 14 Jan 2008 11:42 am
Subject: Re: [ExI] Pirate Party










At 08:20 PM 1/13/2008,

What's really silly is that there is a solution.  The theoretical 
reason for copyright is to encourage creators of content.  This has 
been mutated to the point that creators get almost nothing in the 
traditional distribution economy.

With the Internet that changes.  What would make much better sense is 
to put a small surcharge on Internet usage like they did on tape a 
number years ago.  I have no idea how the income from tape sales was 
parceled out, but it would not be hard to measure the number of times 
creative content was downloaded and pay a proportional share to the creators.

This is likely to happen if the distribution companies realize they 
have little other choice.

Keith

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat



 


________________________________________________________________________
More new features than ever.  Check out the new AOL Mail ! - http://webmail.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20080114/936784cb/attachment.html>