tollie.org/blog thoughts and reflections of Tollie Williams

Is Copyright Still a Fair Deal

Wow. I don't normally find myself reading many slashdot comments, but this one caught my attention as I think it's dead on.

From: http://bit.ly/kG5dH [slashdot.org]

Is Copyright still a fair deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
by thesupraman (179040) on Friday April 03, @08:13PM

This is not the question to ask.

The question to ask is what good are the public getting in return for giving up such freedoms, AND paying for the giving up of such freedoms (dont forget who pay for the FBI, Police, etc), and paying for the protection of the revinue to copyright owning entities.

Now, this is supposed to be the entering in to the public domain (as in becoming free..) of creative content at the end of the copyright period - a fair and equitable arrangement one could say - we protect their profits for a period, and at the end of that, we gain the advantage of their creativity openly.

However, that was in the days of limited copyright periods, these days thanks both to DRM (an unbroken DRM means an item cannot become free after its legal protection stops) and changes to copyright periods (a lot of things we have already paid to protect should be public now, and are not..) we, the people, have lost our end of the 'bargain'.

Perhaps it is time for the copyright owners to be carrying the full costs of enforcing their copyrights, since they don't feel the public should be allowed future advantage of their content?

I wonder what the yearly government costs of copyright enforcement is, it seems more and more public resource is bring piled in to protecting it..

Or perhaps the people (that is, government) should simply cease on their end of the bargain in return, and in light of technological DRM, revoke copyright laws, as they were enacted to protect otherwise unprotectable items (such as books) - does DRM mean we shouldn't have to suffer copyright laws?

Once upon a time there was balance, an equitable deal between the state and copyright holders - the copyright holders have long since stopped holding up their end of the bargain....