Copyright law too depressing
The pre-eminent legal scholar on copyright also happened, until Sunday, to be the pre-eminent blogger on the topic. He was also Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. The state of the debate has become so awful, however, he cannot bring himself to write about it any more.
I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.
Emphasis mine, because in the long run, this intellectual property land grab eventually hurts the owners themselves, even if it allows monopoly rents in the short run...because it is impoversihing the soil from which those cultural artifacts are created. In the material world, the commons is destroyed by overexploitation, but in the creative world, the commons is destroyed by underfertilizing...