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I think I detect some

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 2007-05-08 09:13.

I think I detect some sarcasm in your reply :-), but let me just say: it is not society's responsible to guarantee the success of some particular business model at the expense of others.

There's a vast gulf between "guarantee" and "support".

Copyright goes something like this: Intellectual works are the property of everyone (once they are released to the public). But we want to encourage people who create original work to do so, so we grant them a limited exclucivity (copyrights expire) to profit from their work.

If we remove copyright, there's no fiscal motivation to create any intellectual material. People would still write books, but professional authorship would be gone. The same is true in software.

Does anyone here truely think that HalfLife2 would exist if Valve could not make any money from it? Even most open-source programmers earn their money from works with copyright.

If you steal my bicycle, I have no bicycle. If you steal and put on bittorrent the program I spent the last year living off credit to devote to writing it, then I have no way to pay back my creditors. Even if my prgram is a huge success.

And I would point out that those GPL companies offer plenty of works under copyright.

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Videos

"The Public Perception of Copyright" (Video interviews, Chicago, 2006)

To document the public perception of copyright today, we went around Chicago with a video camera over two days in the summer of 2006, asking strangers what they think about copyright...

"History of Copyright and Information Ownership" (Talk by Karl Fogel, at the Stanford University Library, 19 Oct 2006)

The talk lasts about 90 minutes, including the question-and-answer period. The audience members' backgrounds were in library science, computer science, publishing, and law, so the Q&A is as useful as the talk.