alt Hacker NewsCopyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
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This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.