the best analogy is comparing a computer Operating System to the highway system–with proprietary solutions, we’d end up with a bunch of toll roads, while with Free/Open Source software, it is a commons, built and maintained by the community!

Private DRM needs WIPO WCT/WPPT treaties to condemn DRM or RMI circumvention (WCT art 12/13 if I recall well). They also need effective enforcement and sanctioning (IP with teeth : TRIPS).

Rather than government action, I would suggest international bodies support is requested.

Some tentative thoughts: To be claimed as a right under law, a creation should be non-trivial, and unlikely to be duplicated by others independently.

With abusive intellectual property claims, such as trivial software patents, the patent holder can become the one who’s getting free benefit from the efforts of others.

1) In Russia the new copyright law had been enacted by Pres. V.Putin on July 28, 2004. This created a MAJOR public outcry. This law outlaws pretty much any online library. Note that online libraries in Russia have significantly different social meaning vs. the US. Consider for instance the site http://www.lib.ru – it carries about 5GB of texts in .txt format, including major Russian and Western classics (translations as well as some originals), poetry and contemporary literature. People consider reading a book (on paper OR online) as their _natural_right_. If necessary, they did it underground as “Samizdat” during the Soviet times, they do it openly now. Reprinting a book had always been considered an act of courage or otherwise a positive activity spreading the enlightment. It is not a habit however to even think of such “nonsence” as royalties, esp. if the original author has deceased. E.g. something like extension of copyright locks on the Mickey Mouse cause bewilderment and sarcasm.

2) Significant problem with current copyright laws, its enforcement and the evolving technology is the rigid corporate structure, which is not flexible enough to embrace the new reality. For instance, if you consider a “liquid content”, the cost of PROCESSING the royalty payments on a single track according to the RIAA standards costs MORE, than the VALUE of the royalty. Moreover, the behemots of the recording industry have a very vague idea of how to proceed. So far they chose the administrative and legal actions vs. positive creativity. That’s sad. They tried to do something – e.g. about 150 mil. spent by Sony on the failed project to address the above reality; the emerging joint venture between Warner and Universal… Will see. It is reasonable to expect however that DRM-like and RIAA-like actions will have only limited success if at all, unless they work out a successful strategy for cost processing and redistribution. However if they succeed in policing rather than in business model evolution, that would be devastating. Here in the US we already face a Soviet-like reality (random checks in Boston T; pending prohibition of the photography in NYC Subway, library records subpoenas, etc). USSR operated as a single large corporation, including the policing of content/information redistribution. The different reason had been put on the banners (political rather than economical) but the outcome is the same. To top it off if we get draconian rules on redistribution of the INFORMATION and content, bringing the look’n’feel of everyday intellectual life very close to – NOT even a Soviet Union (where intellectuals always laughed off the System), but rather North Korea.

That situation is definately not consistent with libertarian ideals.

BTW, let me show you where I am coming from. I run a website about Dutch text adventures. These are a kind of computer game still produced today, but which had their heyday in the 1980s.

In those days, games were distributed either on cassette tapes of floppy disks. Both are magnetic media with extremely short lifespans. You can imagine that without the many, many ‘criminals’ around the world who made illegal copies of these games, an entire part of our culture (and that part shaped a large part of my journey to adulthood) would have disappeared. In this case, even 50 years would not have helped; 5 to 10 would have been cutting it close.

I try and contact authors of these games and ask them to release the games as freeware (or really any license they like). Sometimes I am successful, as with Dracula, the oldest Dutch text adventure. Unfortunately, the author could not find all the versions he made. The most prolific Dutch game writer of that time sees his work as a 1980s game author for the C64 as a chapter of a closed book, so a lot of his games (although some are available illegally) will probably not survive.

I agree only in the literal sense. The “work” doesn’t enjoy the same amount of exposure than it might ordinarily. It’s good, however, for the copyright holder. He now has the ability to sell copies of or access to his work and profit from it, depending upon the market’s demand.

Perhaps I should have written “I believe that an author’s rights to profit from his own works should be protected.” I wasn’t trying to suggest that the work itself enjoy some sort of protection not typically afforded by copyright law, though a good copyright law should not allow this works to disappear simply because the author still holds copyrights over it but otherwise has completely forgotten about its existence. This is one major tragedy of our current copyright system (and, more directly, the numerous extensions granted). As they say, there are silent films that are still under copyright and are disappearing from existence, because it’s illegal to copy them, and the copyright holders don’t care. I shudder to consider how much easier this will be in a digital world, when it’s illegal to copy a piece of data that is never fixed in permanent storage. If I’m not allowed to hold on to it for even a few minutes, how am I supposed to hold onto it for the life of the author + 70 years for it to enter the public domain? And what storage medium could hope to last that long? I do agree with these points, though I wasn’t attempting to discuss them in my earlier post.

“In the long run, most works are being destroyed by copyright,”

Once the author has had a reasonable amount of time to reap whatever profits he can from his work, his copyright should lapse and the work should enter the public domain (or, for those in the “credit where credit is due” camp, a tremendously expanded form of “fair use” would begin, perhaps just requiring derivatives not to act like the work is entirely their own). This can only happen with a more reasonable interpretation of “limited time”.

“force the author to take protection measures“

Perhaps a good compromise can do both? Allow the author some exclusive rights automatically, for, say, 5 years, and after that, he has to take positive steps to protect his copyright up to a maximum of, say, 20 years.

One has to balance the needs of the smaller authors and copyright holders with the larger copyright holders. Specifically, how much money would Disney lose by losing Mickey Mouse? How much does society lose by keeping a good work suppressed for the next hundred years “just in case” the holder (or, say, his great-great grandchildren, because the author sure as heck isn’t going to have a use for it 70 years after he’s dead) might want to make another few dollars?

I hate the idea of a world where every useful concept, idea, or approach “belongs” to a group of rent-seeking creeps.

I don’t feel like I’ve got any special insight in finding the right balance there. Copyrights and patents don’t sound bad in principle, but my feeling is they’re getting abused and we are sliding much too far toward the world of rent-seeking creeps.

I probably would have leaned more the other way ten years ago, and I suspect libertarians in general would have. Being a computer geek and seeing the jackassery of software patents, the DMCA, and the spectre of pervasive DRM has made it clearer to me how easily IP can be abused.

You might get in touch with Jimbo Wales. He’s the lead guy of Wikipedia, and is obviously has a great deal of affection for the project and the free sharing of information. Unless things have changed in the last few years, he’s also a staunch Objectivist. He’s an articulate guy and might have some interesting thoughts on the differences between IP and physical property from that POV.

In my opinion, your beliefs are contradictory here. If a work is burdened by copyright, that is, if only the author controls its distribution, then in most cases that will be bad for the work. In the long run, most works are being destroyed by copyright, because it is often not in the interest of the author to invest time and money to keep the work alive. So works that are under copyright are far from being protected by copyright.

The best protection for a work is to either remove the copyright, or to force the author to take protection measures. The latter would probably come down to some form of mandatory licensing. Both methods enable parties other than the author to disseminate and distribute the work, thereby keeping it alive and protected.