[GolfPopper]

When it comes to the evils (and goods) of copyright, it is hard to go wrong with Thomas Babington Macaulay's address to the House of Commons in 1841[1]:

"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."

He was decrying the increase in term of copyright to life of the author + 50 years.

1.https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

[matheusmoreira]

That is a powerful address, indeed. Good thing to know even in 1841 people saw what copyright would become today: an intolerable monopoly granted by the government, functionally infinite.

Seriously, this text is so great. I read the entire thing. It's nearly two hundred years old and contains everything one needs to know about copyright in 2024. Thank you for posting it.