Maybe if we stopped saying "copy" everywhere we’d find a way to fix copyright?
This control over those enjoying and using cultural works was neither precedented nor anticipated by legislators, so the basic law involved includes no attempts to balance the needs of society and of creators of works where digital works are concerned. Instead, the only limit on the controls imposed on users is the imagination of the businesses administering copyrights. The focus of that imagination is naturally the maximisation of income and control, even to the extent of creating scarcity artificially where it does not otherwise arise, so that the maximum number of control points exist for monetisation.
But even worse, the penalties the law provides for breaching those fanciful licenses are also unbalanced. They’re intended to punish people who unlawfully mass-manufacture, not those whose cultural enjoyment breaches some unreasonable-but-legal license. As a result they unjustly — but legally — apply overwhelmingly disproportionate punishments to ordinary citizens.
Read the full article @ Computerworld UK.
