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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don" data-source="post: 88293" data-attributes="member: 1371">Umbran:Did you know that people thought it was ludicrous to be able to copyright musical performances and vinyl records up until sometime in the 1960s?As for your comment on modern ability to mass reproduce music, you've made a fatal logical flaw: technology today has allowed the average person to make any kind of music (even something comparable to the orchestral classics).  Getting rid of IP would absolutely NOT reduce the amount of music and books being created.  Not by a long shot.  There are thousands of people all over the world writing books and making fantastic music for the love of it.  Thanks to the mindset of many people in our culture - and the fact that IP cartels (like the RIAA and MPAA) have situated themselves in the position of regulating and selling parts of our culture - these wonderful works wallow in obscurity because "it can't be any good if it's free".Yes, let us consider the modern novel.  It takes a long time and effort to write one.  Thousands of people write short and long stories for free.  For the love of it.  A work of art generated for the love of it will be better than one generated for the love of money 9 times out of 10.IP creates artificial restrictions on infinite resources.  No where is it guaranteed that a person should make money for doing something (which is a belief that corporations have successfully instilled on a surprising number of people).  Culture, especially, should be free of the polluting effects of money.If we had popular distribution outlets for freely created electronic art (music, books, etc.) and a method for donating money to the creators we'd have much higher quality art and people could still make a buck.  It's just like when VCRs came out and the movie industry cried about the impending doom, and yet the opposite happened.  Or when Napster first got popular and the music industry said the sky was falling, and yet sales rose (in fact, sales started to fall after Napster was shut down!).  Photocopiers didn't kill books.  Rewriteable CDs and high speed internet didn't kill the video game industry (which continues to make insane profits).  Society will not collapse if IP laws were scaled back to reasonable amounts of time (for example, 2 years for computer programs, 5 years for books, or something like that, instead of lifetime+125-or-whatever-insane-amount of time that corporations have bribed the government into writing into law).Your mentioning the ability to mass produce things brings up this point: if we can create something faster, then it stands to reason that the majority of sales should occur during a shorter time period.  Why, then, have copyright laws been increase by an order of magnitude since their inception?One answer: Greed.  Pure and simple.  That's the only reason why Disney has stolen Mickey Mouse from the people (yes, Mickey Mouse would have belonged to the public by now if it weren't for corporations buying laws).Alright, everyone's sick of me talking about this so I'll shut up.  No more posts to this thread from me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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