New markets, new ideas, and new creators are actually what copyright is supposed to promote, not restrict. Using copyright to lock in existing gatekeepers and massive rightsholders’ profits helps neither the public nor individual artists.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
and a mechanism by which to do so
by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Rightto their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The purpose is great, the mechanism is dogshit in the 21st century, as it just lazily crams information into capitalism rather than adapting capitalism to the realities of information.
The problem is that capitalism is a system entirely based around things that are scarce, and it only functions in that context. Air for instance is completely free and valueless, even though it’s wildly critical, just because it is abundant. In capitalism things don’t have value when they are useful or needed, just when they are scarce.
That works fine-ish when you mostly deal in physical goods, because the way that energy and mass scale means that they are somewhat inherently scarce, it takes just as much mass/energy to make a second copy as the first. Information blows this apart though, starting with the written word, escalating with the printing press, and being oblitered in the digital connected age, as information does not scale like energy / mass and as a result it has become trivial to infinitely copy and distribute information, making it abundant the moment it’s digitized.
So now you have the Constitution enshrining mechanisms that enforce scarcity where there is absolutely no need for scarcity.
The problem is that it specifies both a purpose
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Artsand a mechanism by which to do so
by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.The purpose is great, the mechanism is dogshit in the 21st century, as it just lazily crams information into capitalism rather than adapting capitalism to the realities of information.
The problem is that capitalism is a system entirely based around things that are scarce, and it only functions in that context. Air for instance is completely free and valueless, even though it’s wildly critical, just because it is abundant. In capitalism things don’t have value when they are useful or needed, just when they are scarce.
That works fine-ish when you mostly deal in physical goods, because the way that energy and mass scale means that they are somewhat inherently scarce, it takes just as much mass/energy to make a second copy as the first. Information blows this apart though, starting with the written word, escalating with the printing press, and being oblitered in the digital connected age, as information does not scale like energy / mass and as a result it has become trivial to infinitely copy and distribute information, making it abundant the moment it’s digitized.
So now you have the Constitution enshrining mechanisms that enforce scarcity where there is absolutely no need for scarcity.
So how should it be changed then? Because giving no protection to inventors is not the answer.