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posted by LaminatorX on Friday April 24 2015, @02:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the useful-progress dept.

It's election season in the UK, and the Green Party's policy document has been coming under scrutiny recently. In it is a desire to reduce copyright term to 14 years (not life + 14 years, but 14 years from publication).

Unsurprisingly, this has received a bit of a backlash from various parties.

There's no chance the Green Party will form the next government, so this is all academic, but is this a sensible idea? Are people overreacting?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday April 25 2015, @12:37AM

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday April 25 2015, @12:37AM (#174901) Journal

    to create the artificial scarcity the GP was talking about.

    The opposite of scarce is not FREE.

    Just because there is a price, does not mean something is scarce. It merely means someone has to spent time and effort to provide it for you, so you don't have to lift a finger. Those people don't work for free, and I suspect you don't either.

    You want the 27000 copies of an artist's work? Pay for them.

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  • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday April 28 2015, @01:01AM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Tuesday April 28 2015, @01:01AM (#175914)

    Those people don't work for free, and I suspect you don't either.

    They don't work for free, which is why they should ask for money for performing a service. The real problem begins when they try to tell others how to use their own equipment to copy and transfer data, and unleash government thugs to enforce their little monopoly.

    You want the 27000 copies of an artist's work? Pay for them.

    You realize that computers will make copies no matter what, right? Apparently you expect the author/artist to be paid whenever a copy is made, but that is simply insane.

    And this mentality is doomed to fail, anyway. In the Age of Information, trying to place restrictions on copying is a hopeless endeavor, as evidenced by all the websites in existence that have pretty much everything available for free.