Zolgar: I'm just simply going to say this:
Your views on the copyright laws indicate you have never tried to make money off something you created, and have too limited of a view to see past "Well, I don't want to pay for a 10 year old video game."
The fact that I
do pay money for 10 year old games even when pirated versions are readily available pretty much trashes your last statement. As for never having tried to make money off of what I've created... well, sit down kid, I'll tell you a little about what I do. I work as a medicinal chemist at a small pharmaceutical company- basically I try to design new drugs. While my company doesn't deal with copyrights, we do deal with patents. As I said, the company I work at is fairly small compared to the rest of the industry, only about 100 employees, but even at this size our burn rate is around $60-70 million a year, and that's without even having any phase 3 clinicals currently in progress. Bringing a single drug to market usually takes 8-10 years from project inception. Without having patents that allow us to monetize the compounds we design and make our entire industry wouldn't even be able to exist in its current form. And despite all this I also think that the patent system needs to undergo major reform (trimming down patent length a bit and narrowing the scope of what patents can claim). I hold this belief because I see patents having gone beyond what is necessary to provide incentive for invention, to the point where they're actually detrimental to further invention, and thus doing harm to society. I see copyrights as having the same problem, to an even greater extent.
Zolgar: Writers often struggle to make money until they make it big. Are you saying that we should now make them PAY 5 years later to restore their rights to make money off their book, for another 5 years? It would make it even harder for writers to become full-time professional writers.
If they made little or no money in the first 5 years then the fee wouldn't be very large, now would it (pop quiz: what's 5% of zero?) If the first work they created hasn't made much money after 10 years, but has earned the writer some recognition and popularity, then all they need to do is write another book and cash in on that popularity. Imagine that, actually having to do work to keep getting paid. The thing is, no one is entitled to receive money- it's each person's responsibility to figure out how to market their labor, goods, or creative works in a way that is profitable for them. If a creator isn't able to figure out how to do that within 10 years then that's their problem. We as society gave them that 5-10 year monopoly as an incentive to create, it's them that wasn't able to figure out a good way to put it to use.
Zolgar: Same thing with musicians. A small ind musician should only be able to make money off their album sales for 5, maybe 10 years?
They can continue to make as much money as they are able, just without the support of an artificial monopoly granted by the public. Or they could make money off of monetizing their work in other ways, such as concerts (which is where most musicians make the bulk of their money anyway).
Zolgar: Game companies shouldn't be able to still make money off f old games that people STILL want to play after 10 years?
Again, of course they can continue to make money off of the game they made, they just need to figure out a way to do so without the public extending their artificial monopoly.
Zolgar: Let me put this in to another perspective, one that you might understand:
When you create something, you own it. Copyrights are in place because intellectual property isn't exactly a physical thing, but none the less it is something you own.
The concept of ownership breaks down for things that can be duplicated infinitely at no cost. At its most basic level, "intellectual property" is simply an idea. When you have an idea it remains your sole possession only for as long as you do not share it. But the moment you do so the person you share it with is also given possession of that idea. In fact they are given possession to such an extent that they are not able to dispossess themself of that idea, even if they wanted to. At the same time, though, in sharing that idea you are not dispossessed of it; it still belongs to you, it just also belongs to whoever you shared it with as well. And this continues every time the idea is shared. Once you fully understand this, it is inevitable that one comes to understand that claiming "ownership" of an idea is completely unrelated to any conventional sense of ownership, but rather is an attempt to control what
other people may do with ideas they possess, and no longer has anything to do with control of your own idea. To quote Richard Stallman on the matter: "Control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult."
The idea of "intellectual property" is completely divorced from any conventional concept of ownership. Rather, it is an entirely artificial construct (and a quite recent one at that, taken in the scope of human history), created for the practical purpose of providing incentive for the creation of creative works. However, copyright as it currently stands goes far beyond what is necessary to accomplish this goal, and actually does much to work against it, which is why it needs to be changed.
Finally, I'll finish up by saying that people with your perspective on copyright strike me as incredibly childish. This is because creative works are not developed in a vacuum, but rather are built upon thousands of years of collected culture. Billions of creators before you have laid out this culture that you have freely immersed yourself in, but then the moment you use this culture to create some slightly new amalgam of it you greedily clutch it to your chest, screaming "Mine! Mine! All mine!" Grow up.
