Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Copyright Is A Contradiction

As these articles point out, ACTA may have the completely unintended consequence of actually weakening copyright law, because it was a back room treaty. It's hard for anyone to respect intellectual property laws when compared to criminal laws. The latter clearly benefit everybody by ensuring a just and civil society. IP laws only serve corporate interests.

Some may point out that open source licences are the exception. However, if copyright did not exist, you wouldn't need an open source license, because everything you publish is automatically in the public domain. Everyone is free to use your work as they please. The only way to prevent that would be to keep it private. Copyright law allows you to publish but exert control over the work as if you had kept it private. Copyright is a contradiction.

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