Fighting the Copyright Contagion

Mike Masnick spots a nasty new trend:

trying to create "copyright-like" regulations on what you can do with non-information goods. In a normal, functioning economy, if you buy something, it's yours. You are then free to do what you want with it, whether that's modify it, enhance it, destroy it or resell it. In the copyright world, there is some ability to mimic this behavior with a "right of first sale," but there are still so many limitations within copyright that others have looked to take those limitations beyond copyright. We've already seen efforts, such as the law in Japan to ban the sale of some used electronics as well as a push in the UK to grant artists a resale royalty as well (so that any time a piece of their artwork is resold, the artists would get another cut).

While the aims of the music managers may be good (they claim it's to protect consumers from being ripped off by scalpers), the means are highly questionable. A market is efficient for a reason, and giving the original "owner" the right to a cut from every resale messes with that efficiency and is simply unnecessary. It simply becomes a way to get paid multiple times for the same product, distorting the real market.

Another reason to knock back copyright to reasonable levels.