| > you are not realizing that respecting copyright law and abiding by those rules, as "unfair" as they may be, is the only thing that protects companies from being ruthlessly shared on uTorrent for free, and that if you were truly creative and trying to form a business, why not respect this law, and take additional effort to create something "new" and "original" Copyright law is not meant to protect companies. From a historical perspective, it has always meant to temporarily protect authors' rights to their inventions so that society can get more works from those authors. Citing the US constitution (other countries have different justifications, but I assume that you are in the US): > [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; This matches the purpose of the copyright system defined in 1710 under Statute of Anne (which inspired this clause in the constitution). The copyright system that pre-dated the Statute of Anne was a system of censorship by the publishing houses (that were members of the Printers' Guild), and the public rebelled against their censorship and Queen Anne strove to come up with a system that was far more fair and was meant to inspire authors to produce more work (rather than restrict what they can write so publishers can make more money). Having a copyright system that protects publishers (which is what we currently have) and lasts for 70 years after the death of the author does not "promote the Progress" of anything (in fact it actively stifles it). I would argue current copyright law is unconstitutional in the US, but I don't have enough money to fight that fight (and the only people that do benefit from copyright law's overreach). Unfortunately, in our modern age, the true purpose of copyright has been forgotten. People (like yourself) think that the purpose is to protect companies profits -- this could not be further from the truth. Such companies benefit from this misinformation, and regularly lobby the US Congress to add laws which further expand copyright laws (both in breadth as well as length) that result in even more profits for large companies without any more works made as a result. The true hypocrisy is that many of these companies would not have been able to make their works at all without the public domain, and without liberal copyright laws. The first cartoon Mickey Mouse appeared in (Steamboat Willie) made use of things from previous movies (Steamboat Bill Jr -- which was released 50 years earlier). > out of respect for the law that protects from 100% bad actors which do not wish to creatively enhance, but to sell or distribute identical copies of original creative work. Even if we ignore that these copyright laws are written by these same corporations (that themselves used public domain, and even infringed on copyrighted works from smaller publishers, to make their products), as I said above this is missing the purpose of copyright law. |