On Apr 6, 2012, at 7:47 PM, David Parsons wrote: > After the case is won. You still have to pay your lawyer up front. > Copyright cases are notoriously expensive to fight.
I expect the whole issue of copyright is going to go through a seismic shift in the not too far distant future, and that we will largely have the record and movie companies to thank for it. Copyright law came about when the infrastructure for making copies of a work was relatively expensive, at least for the infrastructure, so it was easy to track down who had the printing press. The entertainment industry was based on the grossly huge profit margins that they could command when people couldn't easily make good copies. For every dollar they lost to college students who listened to bootleg tapes of friends albums that they might have bought, if the tape wasn't available, they probably made $20 from those same people buying albums they might not have heard of without those tapes, once they graduated and got good jobs. When cheap digital file sharing came about, rather than looking at how the world was changing and seeing what they could do in the long run, they went crazy draconian on people trying to scare them into submission, and just ended up pissing everyone off. Once someone get it into their head that it's not bad to steal music from evil bastards like the music industry, it's not a big jump for them to accept the idea of just copying everyone's work. I think that while the big publishing houses are cranking the screws down tighter, and pissing people off, the folks who grew up with file sharing, at one point, will have the governmental power, and they'll actually change the laws, probably way beyond what most of us would consider fair use. By that time, they'll just be codifying what is the cultural norm anyways. If we're lucky, people may not be quite so cavalier about plagiarism, someone claims that your photos are their own. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
