One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …
You can have that library today (see: Project Gutenberg), just on a delay. The problem, IMO, is that the delay is much too long. If copyright only lasted 10 years, it would be much more useful as a store of human knowledge. We could even allow an application for a longer term for smaller creators who need more time to monetize their works.
That’s pretty close to how it used to work in the US, it has just been twisted by large orgs like Disney and the RIAA.
Yeah Project Gutenberg really demonstrates how this is all pretty much already built, just illegal to include recent works in. Though of course that’s just books where the post copyright free library could also include all other art and culture such as tv, radio, movies, images, games, etc
Sure, and there’s no reason it can’t include other art and culture, like TV shows, radio programs, etc. The main issue is the length of time before those become legal to redistribute. It sucks that only movies made in the early 1900s are legal to redistribute, when the most culturally relevant works are still 50+ years away from entering the public domain.
So we should be looking at shortening that time, trying to end copyright entirely isn’t going to happen.
Shortening the time is good, and adjusting it while it still does apply to allow for more legal free sharing of the work.