This is a perfect argument against the current copyright paradigm.
One could use that argument + a deep understanding of influence, and argue nothing actually belongs to any one of us anymore. as nothing really ever did. 
Perhaps instead of an age limit there should be a profit limit. Once a copyright holder receives more than (x) amount of income from said copyrighted material - adjusting for inflation over time, and varying depending on what is being copyrighted, ie a movie would generally cost alot more than a song to produce - the copyright is lifted. This would encourage people to set more reasonable recommended retail pricing; since profits would be capped at a set amount it would make sense to drop prices of individual units to both move individual units and also appeal to a greater audience, rather than what is done now: trying to always maximise profits for each unit and spend some of the total pool to advertise as a means to ensure high sales volumes. I’ve done more than my share of retailing and I can say for sure, that good prices speak for themselves… the majority of people are tight-arses and not inclined to buy something even if they want it, but 9 times out of 10 will impulse buy on the spot if they know for themselves already or you can prove to them that it is a bargain.
Another benefit I can think of with this is that it would encourage record companies to produce as much variety as possible rather than the systems of mass production they seem to like so much; I’m sure theres a factory in China that does nothing but print Britney Spears CD’s or some shit. If they knew they were only ever going to make a certain amount out of any album in the form of royalties they wouldn’t focus so much on inventing superstars. I’m sure superstars would be more common too, since there would be more chances for people with potential to get started… and there shouldn’t be anything stopping people from making a killing performing live, or creating a tonne of material and getting the full amount of profit for each. Hard work and good ideas and natural talent should still be encouraged and rewarded, I think.
The problem with this idea, as I’m sure someone would point out, is that it’s very directly taking aim at Hollywood and big record companies… big-name actors and artists would be less likely to sign over large percentages of their royalties over to a label/studio since it would be finite number of potential dollars available, and they would be wiser to organise cheaper alternatives for themselves rather than have large chunks of their profits contracted out to big companies in return for the promise of mass exposure; big names need little introduction…and currently the fat off the big names keep the paper mill running.
I know, something like this would definitely be resisted at almost every level.
edit: perhaps the solution could be a combination of both; an age limit of the copyright to begin with, and then if the profit isn’t reached it lasts until it does… This would cater for the little guy who never made a cent off his tune which is remade into a pop-hit 20 years later, and potentially a ‘bargain bin’ environment for smalltime artists (which is one of the base intentions of a pure profit-limit), while still allowing the industry to continue its current practice of flooding the markets and making huge profits on popular debuts. could be a good step in the right direction, since the consumer might have a little more say in what becomes popular… too many people just go for whats put in front of them, and the big companies have no reason to try and change this mentality. Why should the laws encourage them to dumb populations down in such a way?
BOOM!!!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090629/0230145396.shtml
[quote]
The Myth Of Original Creators
from the creativity-is-built-upon-others-ideas dept
We recently wrote about how many different sources Shakespeare used in writing King Lear, some of which he apparently copied verbatim. However, it seems quite likely that what Shakespeare did with those words created something wholly unique and valuable (at least, it’s withstood the tests of time). Yet, this idea that taking the works of others and doing something with them to make them new and wonderful seems to be an anathema to the “true believers” in copyright, who insist that creativity is about being wholly original, and almost never about building on the works of those who came before. Yet, there’s almost no evidence to support this. Nearly any creative work can be shown to be built upon the works of those who came before (hell, even our own copyright law is copied from others’)…/quote]
lol, yes… this is pretty common unfortunately. :< swedish university students aren’t exactly the people that “get around” all that much so i’m not surprised. people are a lot more liberal in that respect in germany, not to mention nl.
you didn’t hang with the right swedes! =)
i remember when i hung out with erasmus students in rotterdam… can’t understand how they get shit all done tbh but it was a great time!
Sweden is much more narrow minded on weed and drugs in general than Norway and both are much more narrow minded than Denmark. The pirate party have no opinion on weed.
I did NOT vote for them…
My view on filesharing etc is this: It should be legal to download anything as long as the correct information about the author of the content is included. Then your ISP will pick this information up and pay a fee to the author(s). Then they can either put that on your personal broadband bill, or rise the price for all users.
Prices should be set differently for different media.
Then there would be no need for for example record companies, anyone should be able to sign up as an author with some unique identification name or number. The problem would be people changing the author to themselves on files, or for example just sending the same file to themselves 1000000 times, which of course would be illegal and something for the authorities to watch.
interesting stuff tho’ … all that crap needs some redo as we can see it’s falling apart due to its age … already.
And anti-electricity , but i guess they wanna pull the big switch lol