My impression is that the cost of the schemes you are proposing or support <snip> exceed the financial gain to publishers and authors.
Quite possibly- but that's for the market to decide.
My concerns with copyright are moral, and lie chiefly with the threat it poses to speech and derivative works, its imposition of a distinction between author and audience, and, in the case of noncommercial copying in the digital era, the negative social consequences of attempting to enforce the unenforceable.
My concerns lie in the moral as well.
Name another form of property that features full ownership (not leases, licenses, life estates, etc) rights that can be taken away by the mere operation of time, potentially without compensation.
There are very, very few- at this time, only adverse possession springs to mind- and that is not a universally accepted rule of law.
Before copyright, the only rights in IP a person had was what he (or his agents, or his successors in interest) could enforce by himself personally- but if he could do so, he could enforce them ad infinitum.
Under a copyright regime, in exchange for a system of laws through which an IP holder can enforce his rights, he gives up the right to eternal personal exploitation of his creation.
Do you think a landholder would like that kind of setup?
Would you like it if someone could take your Grandmother's wedding ring from you because they liked it and you had had it "long enough?"
I want a society awash in culture and creativity in which all take part, and I see that the potential to achieve this is the greatest that it has been for a very long time.
A great deal of that is due to copyright and other forms of IP protection. Between manditory licensing regimes in music and the operation of the free market allowing the creation of other licenses, the world has experienced an explosion in creative ideas reaching the masses.
Role playing games are one realm in which participation is the rule, where the distinction between author and audience is so clearly artificial. I doubt this is your intent, but I find that the complex and burdensome legal and technological measures you appear to support are anethema to that realm, that culture and that society.
The distinction between author and audience is not artificial, just fluid. Gaming is a form of collaborative fiction. Similar forms, such as shared world fictions like the Thieves' World books, have historically required that authors using the work of others get clearance. In RPGs, one person creates the mass framework, others move and act within it. The GM has a copyright in his campaign world, his players in their PCs.
Nor is it my intent to burden the games. My intent is:
1) to make it difficult for those who abuse the goodwill of game designers to do so, even if they are "fans."
and
2) to provide a quick and universal way for printers to ascertain that the copy they are making is legal so that you could walk into
any Staples or Kinko's
anywhere and be assured that you won't get
wrongfully refused service someplace- not to prevent gamers from getting legal hard copies of PDFs.
