I too believe that currently copyright is a useful tool for promoting the arts and sciences, and innovation in general. Where we perhaps differ is whether it deserves a place in the economy in, say, fifty years. If digital copying makes creating and sharing a copy of a work a zero-cost action, how then does one make the argument that we should be imposing artificial restrictions on people such that they have to follow a set of rules handed down from the content producer?

One could argue that the content has a value and that value should be protected. I agree that content is valuable, however, laws protecting it are doomed to failure due to not only the population that simply wishes to get something for nothing, but also those who want to reuse the work for their own useful creation.

I wonder if you’ve looked at proposals such as the Street Performer Protocol or the Digital Art Auction. Both allow content producers to generate revenue from their works from the populace as a whole (perhaps your ‘patron’ as mentioned in the interview, but the widest one possible: everyone). I haven’t seen too many people using them thus far, which leads me to believe that there is something about them that doesn’t fill the niche that copyright serves currently… the only thing I can think of is residuals, or continuing per-item sales. But again, if copying is a zero-cost transaction, why should a user have to pay the content producer to perform an action which costs both of them nothing?

Anyway, I’m curious what you (and others) think of these types of proposals, and possibly ways to fix them.

To be honest, I thought that the troops would be withdrawn from Iraq after GW Bush clicked “I Agree” on some ersatz terrorist website that stipulated on page 67 that the troops be removed.

Today, we live in an environment where voluminous and one-sided contracts that no one has time to read need to be clicked immediately or at least are portrayed to the naive as having to be clicked without delay.

Remember it is democracy and the will of the majority which gave us the current president, the current congress, these stupid wars, and a federal bureaucracy with no respect for the law which it enforces. Less democracy and a restoration of republican principles is the solution.

“[because] the name of the game is money, and the fact is they [members of Congress] still largely depend on lobbyists for the money to bulk up their campaigns.” [Leon Panetta quoted in the NYT ( http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/washington/25lobby.html?hp)

The quote illustrates perfectly (and depressingly) the attitude problem you are talking about: this is how it is so this is how it will be. Changing that is the biggest challenge. Hope Change Congress can improve the situation.

Ramsay

I’ve seen you speak via the internet many times before and was fortunate to see you speak in 2007 at The University of Texas campus about free culture (Sanford Levinson’s student, in case you remember–though likely not). Once again, it’s been my pleasure to see you out fighting the good fight. I was also pleased to see that Charlie Rose was familiar with your arguments and seemed to be on your side. We the People need all the help from the media we can get.

Your argument about the difference between the Presidency and Congress for public funding purposes was compelling. I’ve been struggling with Obama’s reneging on his public financing promise, because I have been a supporter of his for a while. My concern was that in the presidential race Obama would not have won without massive amounts of money simply because of his lack of name recognition among those who do not watch CNN religiously.

The conclusion seems to be that the longest-serving candidate (or incumbent) has a massive advantage in all elections if each candidate receives public financing simply because, all things being equal (money included), name recognition is one thing that unbalances the equation.

Do you think that this result would actually occur if public financing were mandatory? Or does it even matter, since the Change Congress movement seems less geared toward ousting certain candidates and more geared toward, at this point, merely changing the money game regardless of who is in office?