Imagine a world without copyright - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Imagine a world without copyright - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

This is an interesting article arguing for an end to all copyright law, but I think it’s rather naive in a lot of its reasoning. For instance, it proposes a “one year usefruct” for works that take a large investment of capital (like movies) so that only the maker of the movie can make money off of it, and then after that it’s anybody’s ballgame, which will allow more people to reap money off the work (”normalizing the field” and taking it away from “creative monopolists”). But I think all this would result in would be people making movies that will be big blockbusters in their first year with no reguard to whether they would last — meaning no one would make movies that might not make a lot of money initially but would pay off in DVD sales and so forth later on. It would be the death of the cult classic and the triumph of shallow movies like “Independance Day”. Further the article asserts that artists whose work takes a long time to be noticed should be supported by community subsidies, but then who would decide which artistic works to support? The government? It’s all very socialized and progressive, to be sure, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’m just not sure it can work, at least not in most of the Western world.

At least not in the United States.

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