SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.
But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite — that freely-available works also generate value.
Public domain works — those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection — create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office. ( https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-and-the-value-of-the-public-domain )
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:52AM
Thanks. Meant to say also that greed retards progress, to the detriment of us all. Greed and fear of loss are the driving motivations for extending copyright scope to cover things that should not be copyrighted, and duration to such extreme lengths. It has nothing to do with the public interest or desire. And it is harmful to us all. Not even good for artists. Our public libraries should be allowed to embrace digital storage. A digital public library would be far cheaper to operate and at the same time far more useful because it is far more searchable. And it could be current. No more returns, late fees, damaged media, and denial because all copies are checked out.
But no, we live with the antiquated and much more costly libraries we've had for years, and many other idiocies, all so that Big Media can drag their feet about changing their business model. It took equally big business interests, like Apple and Amazon, to drag them kicking and screaming into allowing downloads. They would rather continue to sell CDs, with the massive overhead of that distribution method. The ludicrous size of their estimates of losses to piracy that ignores the supply and demand curves of basic economics is telling, one of the clearest indicators that greed is what drives them. I'm looking forward to the demise of the last private bookstores. Used to like them, but paperbacks went up faster than inflation. When they passed the $5 point around 1990, I quit buying. Tried the used bookstore, but meh. Too much trouble to have to check back repeatedly when seeking specific titles. Borders, Waldens, and B. Dalton are all dead. Barnes and Noble is the only large chain I know of that's still in business. I was also unhappy with the game publishers played of holding up the cheap paperback release until a year after the release of expensive hardback versions. Pure profiteering, that. This applies even more to academic and research oriented ones like Elsevier. If anything directly retards the progress of science, it's those greedy private publishers, trying to lock it all up and charge hugely for access, for work that they did not help create or fund, and do not help preserve, indeed make it harder to preserve by trying to stop others from keeping comprehensive copies.