From a common sense point of view: what is the purpose of a copyright?
It is to protect the innovations of an author, so that the due benefits may be rewarded.
The beauty of the system in its original phase was that it was not actually designed to protect the author from his/her gains, but rather protect the viability of public creativity. By having such a system in place, one could share their works with others without fear of intellectual theft. Both author and public gained from this. Then, after a certain period of years when the due proceeds were gained, the work was no longer in the author’s control, but in the public domain. The people could now fully use the original work for their purposes, further promoting creativity. The author was happy and rewarded, and now the public was equally rewarded and happy.
A perfect system for promoting the human will.
Unfortunately, as the recent Kodak vs. Sun case has demonstrated, the copyright system we now have in place is failing the public miserably, and completely destroying the value of creativity it originally set out to protect. I would say “author” as well, but in these cases they are literally non-existent. The copyright protects no one from monetary loss due to their creativity, and ruthlessly stifles that of others.
That leaves the question: then what works is the copyright protecting? It is becomming practice that in fact they protect no works at all, but rather overgeneralised concepts for works. There is a very dangerous distinction to be made here: A concept is not a work at all, it is simply at its most elegant a rough description of an idea. Someone may spend years of research and effort culminating into a unique work. However, if the work falls into a general definition of a category protected under copyright, the author may be required to pay hefty fines and punished for his creativity. Those owning the copyright will gain not for their efforts, but that of others. They will have gained because of the evergrowing fluke in the copyright system which lets people patent concepts and not works.
For example, someone may patent the modern equivalent of “shapes on pages”. Now should someone go out and spend years writing a book, under our current system they would have to pay crippling royalties to the people owning the patent. Crippling is an understatement: under current practices, an author would have to spend his last 4 year’s worth of income to pay off the fact that he/she wrote a book. Those who create and work to create are punished by those who spent nothing more than a few words on a form. This evidently cripples any will to create, and destroys future innovation.
One would think that the above analogy is an extreme. Yet it is not. It is our present. It happens everyday, most falling into a branch called “software patents”. Copyrights for books and movies have settled long ago in a wake, for the most part, of common sense. The front has shifted and moved to that of technology. Unfortunately, because of the gap in knowledge of those implied, no one sees the new copyright debacle going on. Many consider the technicalities of the technology beyond their heads and ignore it, though it indirectly affects them deeply. This lack of caring by the public has permitted large corporations such as Kodak to do the most unethical actions under the copyright laws. The lack of caring has prevented barriers to be set in place.
We cannot let the greed destroy creativity, as it is in our best interests.
We must protect the true authors, and revise the copyright laws.
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