> Remember, public domain is the natural state of information.
Nah, decaying is the natural state of information. It requires non-trivial effort to keep information available for reading and interpreting. Even paper, one of the best mediums for storing data over time, decomposes if not actively protected.
Libraries handle the preserving and sharing to the public of information. In spite of copyright, not thanks to it.
Historically they literally copied one book into paper to duplicate/preserve it. That would be copyright infringement now.
And more recently copyright holders are trying to delete any archives that could be used for that purpose like the internet archive or LibGen.
In other media we have game roms and copies of shows being illegal. Same treatment if it has been a week since release or it's been 20 years and you can't get it legally from anywhere.
It was basically impossible to survive solely as a writer until copyright. Imagine publishing a book in the 16th century. At best you'd get some royalties from the initial publisher. After that if you work becomes popular every printer across the continent can start printing copies without paying you anything. That's obviously a huge impediment to innovation and progress.
So? There are plenty of written works from before copyright. There would be more if we had been better about preservation. People will still write without copyright. Maybe the quality will even go up as there are fewer incentives for quantity over quality.
If your argument for copyright relies on protecting speicific jobs then you have no argument. Jobs become obsolete all the time.
If you want welfare then argue for that. Best if it isn't restricted to a small class of people.
Yes. Way less of them do cause very few people could afford to write.
> Maybe the quality will even go up as there are fewer incentives for quantity over quality
Maybe people who write/etc. time on average produce better quality than those who can only dedicate a few hours per day for it. Also you want to eradicate entire creative industries like cinema and television for no apparent reason.
> If your argument for copyright relies on protecting speicific jobs then you have no argument
No my argument is that copyright protection (including patents) was one of the main driving forces behind the progress of human progress over the last 300-500 years. Obviously the current system is not perfect, I'm not saying it is... Overall it still made the world a much better place than it would have been without it.
Humanity would be more than happy to make that effort if there was no risk of getting sued to oblivion for it. There's more than enough distributed storage capacity out there to hold it all. Copyright holders are the ones who are outright hostile to any and all preservation efforts, to the point preservation of culture is an argument for getting rid of copyright.
Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done.
Oh, but you're only arguing against copyright so you can freely take others work without remuneration. IF you're a creator, and you believe that copyright shouldn't exist - everything you produce, please... put it in the public domain and see what happens.
> Preservation has nothing to do with copyright. Buy a book, and preserve it yourself. Done.
Wrong. My house burns down, the book is gone. Your advice is worse than using RAID is as a backup solution.
Preservation requires multiple independent redundant copies widely distributed over large geographical areas, cryptographically verified. Surely you can see how that flies in the face of copyright, a legal mechanism to give authors a monopoly on the production of copies.
Truth is bittorrent did more for preservation of culture that copyright ever did. You could even quantify how well preserved the data was since you could count how many redundant copies were present in the swarm.
> Cryptographically verified? How did we do it all these years?
Yeah, how did you? Data can get corrupted, you know. Things like hashing and error correction are essential.
> And I would like a source for your claim regarding BitTorrent.
Launch any torrent client. There will be an indicator of how many complete copies exist amongst the peers in the swarm. The higher the number, the more well preserved the data is. Really simple. It's also self-healing since you can check the data and fix errors by downloading the damaged blocks again.
Bittorrent is essentially the Linus Torvalds "real men publish things online so the whole world can mirror it" approach to backup and preservation. Shame copyright holders had to ruin it.
Nah, decaying is the natural state of information. It requires non-trivial effort to keep information available for reading and interpreting. Even paper, one of the best mediums for storing data over time, decomposes if not actively protected.