09.14.09
When Your Previous Thesis Interferes With Your Current Thesis
From: Ubersoft, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
09.09.09
Laws don’t replace skill or talent
People believe the laws should reflect the interests of the society. They argue that copyright laws is important to incentive private parties to produce new content so that in the long term everyone will have access to a richer culture.
Maybe that was the original intent, but today it mostly serves to protect the distributor assets. Writers and musicians sell their rights to the publisher, who profit from the exclusive rights to distribute the content. Only a small percentage of the profit goes back to the artist in the form of royalties.
For the sake of the argument, let’s suppose the artist was able to earn his/her living only from the royalties received, which is not true for most cases. Is it fair that the single owner of the rights profit from it for such an extended time as 70 years after the author’s death, when other people could be creating more interesting stuff based on this work to entertain the rest of us?
Super protective laws will only incentive the mediocrity. We have to settle for “good enough”, when we could have access to great, improved versions of a work.