The Pirate Party is the shape of things to come

"Insults are not an adequate substitute for rational argument."

"Rants like this must be theraputic for the keyboard-basher making them, but they don't seem to be designed to convince anyone outside the Garden Shed."

Why I think 10 years is silly

"When copyright was first created it was decided that 14 years was a sensible length."

Actually, you are incorrect, in the "Copyright Act of 1709." 28 years was a sensible number, requireing one renewal after 14. (I did mention having atleast one renewal)

"This was back when merely copying a work could take days and distributing it across a country and around the world could take weeks or months."

Worldwide distribution would be months, just at sea, but it is a non-sequitor anyway because the orignal copyright laws only delt with domestic copying. Once your work left your own country, the copyright disappeared. It wasn't until 1887 that the Berne Convention took affect for anyone (let alone most-everyone, as is the case now).

"Now content can be transmitted around the world (or even into space) near-instantly."

Transmission time over the interwebs is completely irrelevant. If I am an author I still have to send the final manuscript to a publisher at (which point it is fixed to media, so if we are not going to require registration, we sould start counting) who then has to do a production run, now these stacks of books get put in ISO containers and loaded up on big ships which meander to the ports. Just the time at sea will likely exceed a week. Then the product has to move via land baised transit to reginal distributors before finally going from there to booksellers.

Because we are able to move many goods, not just books, or even just MY book through this system at any one time it is highly effecent over-all, but not partiularly fast. We have economics of scale kicking in at almost every level: the printing press/bindry, the port, the container ship, freight trains. Now it is in the stores, the publisher and I get to start recuping our costs, paying for the editor, the people running the presses, those operating the binding equipment, the transportation costs. That's an awful lot of £9.99 paperbacks I have sell now (and remember, the bookseller is going to take their cut from that too).

I, for one, am not willing to give up real books. when I read for enjoyment, I want to enjoy it. I want to be able to turn the pages. I am also not willing to pay the costs for lower-scale more local production.

Most authors are not going to author if they are not making a reasonable income. Many authors take years to write a manuscript. Joanne Murray's fist manuscript took 5 years. Ray Bradbury took 6 years from the short story he based it on to the first publication of "Fahrenheit 451, " it took 8 years to bring Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" from a short-story to novel, and Nancy Kress 2 to take "Beggers in Spain" from a novella to a full novel.This is not an insignificant chunk of these people's lives, and I think 50 years, is a reasonable period for them to try and earn their living from it, with a check at 25 to see if they really still care.

(I will admit to only haveing read 1/2 of these, but I leave as an exersise to the reader which 1/2 that is)

Please sir, avoid argumentum ad hominem like in your last sentance.

I agree with you that new works are worth protecting. I am one of the people who thinks it's important that authors actually have the chance to make some money on their work, but it's a balencing act, eventually works do need to be able to be aknowladged as part of our culture.

I do wonder if you actually read my post. I beleave Aesop and Homer where both greek. Because you obviously failed to comprhend the point, I will try to simplify it for you even more: "If all works created had fallen under the modern concept of perpetual copyright vast swaths of art would not have been possible." To clarify for you "perpetual" means "never ending." I assure you there are more examples of this then our modatrix will let me post, including productions of and based on the works of greek playwrites and artists.

Now the opinion that was excerpted from was (as I noted in the post) originally directed as USAians, who have an establised track record of perptual copyright, but do you really think Blighty is any better? Before you answer, may I remind you that Copyright, Desgns and Patents Act of 1988 extended the copyright to 50 years past the death of the author, then in 1995 it was extended to 70 years past the death of the author, worded such that it actually pulled works out of the public domain that where already there (not even the USAians have pulled THAT one)

Typical response

"I have no real arguments, therefore your opinion is irrelevant"

Not sure why I bother at this point

Well, lets just go through these point by point shall we?

"This Sixth Form cut-and-paste stuff really isn't helping you. You've arrived late, and missed the discussion. I'll recap for your benefit:"

This is irrelevant and is pretty typical of the sort of sniping you tend to do. But regardless, no, I didn't arrive late, I in fact have a post on page one (possibly page two now with all the replies) of this discussion, and in fact the post you're responding to would have been much earlier in the conversation but got rejected by the mods the first time around.

"My way means nobody needs to lose out, lose rights or choices or access to markets."

No in fact it doesn't, and you just saying so doesn't make it so. You propose that they create some legal file sharing services, which, they in fact have. They do OK, but not terribly well for a variety of reasons, most notably that people don't want to have to pay to share, rather they would rather pay to own, such as in the wildly popular iTunes market. Essentially your argument is that if they make legal P2P services (they have), then piracy will go away (it hasn't), and everyone will be happy (no one is). There are a variety of ways that have been proposed to deal with this, none of them particularly good. There's the route the music and movie industries are currently pursuing which is to in essence make non-authorized file sharing services illegal, never mind the fact that there's lots of things such services are used for on a regular basis that have nothing at all to do with violating copyright. Another tactic such organizations are pursuing is attempting to pawn off enforcement on ISPs, but that doesn't really deal with the problem, it just shifts who has to pay the fees off on an innocent third party. There's also the option being toyed with by a variety of nations including I believe Canada, which is to levy some sort of music tax on everyone and then divide the proceeds among the artists, never mind how exactly an equitable arrangement on how to divide those assets is supposed to be arrived at, or the fact that such a tax by its vary nature is unfair to consumers who may or may not be interested in listening to said artists.

"Your [way] means a lot of people do lose out."

The copyright holders on the whole will not be affected by a reduction of copyright length. Very little profit is ever seen by works older than 10 years, let alone 30. Some companies would be suffer more than others, such as Disney who derives a not inconsiderable portion of their income from artificially restricting the availability of their older movies thereby creating artificially low supply (which of course drives up demand, and in turn leads to higher perceived value). The music industry might also suffer somewhat although probably not in the way you imagine. Assuming for now a 10 year copyright, what it would do is demonstrate the true value of a CD. That is, because anyone could distribute a CD containing works older than 10 years, it would be a race to the bottom, and therefor the company that could produce a good quality CD (and associated packaging) for the cheapest price would be the most successful. I'd guesstimate that you could probably accomplish such for a few dollars including distribution costs to get it to the stores. Such a situation would lead to shelves on which the latest CDs would be sitting around at the current $10 to $15 a piece, along side much older CDs at $2 to $5. Such a situation would probably lead many to wonder why exactly it is that they should pay $10 for a CD, when clearly it's only costing the CD producer something less than ~$3 to produce the CD. Even in such a situation however I think most people would still be willing to pay the $10 assuming it was a band they actually care about, particularly if they knew a significant portion of that ~$7 markup was going to the band and not the distributor.

"You need to justify both morally and economically."

I don't really, but I think I have anyway.

"The Ladybird Book of Lessig will not be of much use to you here. Nor will nostalgia for pre-industrial Feudalism. Off you go."

More irrelevant sniping. I find it particularly hilarious that you invoke feudalism in this case, as you're position is closer to feudalism. Feudalism was all about maintaining a monopoly on land ownership, and you're in favor of maintaining a monopoly on content distribution.