alt Hacker NewsI generally let it slide because these copyright discussions tend to be about America, and as such it can be assumed American law and what it inherits from British law is what pertains.
>Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators,
yes, in the U.S in the EU creators have moral rights to their works and the law is to protect their interests.
There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.
>But it is also increasingly dubious that the public gets a good deal out of copyright law anyway.
In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.
> There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.
And when we talk about copyright we generally talk about the rights of exploitation, where the rationale used today is about the advancement of arts and sciences - a public benefit. There's a reason the name is English is copy-right, where the other Germanic languages focuses more on the work - in the Anglosphere the notion of moral rights as separate from rights of exploitation is well outside the mainstream.
> In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.
Most individual nations copyright law still does uphold the pretence of being for the public good, however. Without that pretence, there is no moral basis for restricting the rights of the public the way copyright law does.
But it has nevertheless been abundantly clear all the way back to the Statute of Anne that any talk of either public goods or rights of exploitation for the creator are excuses, and that these laws if anything mostly exist for the protection of business interests.