21 May 2007

Against Perpetual Copyright

Rather better than my curt dismissal below is this more rigorous explanation of why copyright should not be perpetual. Interestingly, it's a wiki, and therefore a collective creation. Also interestingly, it suffers from one fairly major flaw: it is much too long. So much so that even I, crazed copyright enthusiast that I am, find it hard to read to the end.

I think this may be a problem of the wiki format, which encourages honing and addition, but makes deletion difficult, because it feels like an act of sacrilege against the creation of others. But as any professional writer will tell you, one of the most valuable services that can be performed on prose is to cut it. When it comes to words, less is nearly always more.

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