Class of 2016: Whose works will enter the public domain
I hope in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are (mostly) today. In a society unbounded by information scarcity, to intentionally and systemically stymie it is to intentionally cripple yourself. The immediate magnitude may be less significant, but the long slow death of culture to perpetual copyright is having absolute consequences on our modern society today, with escalating damage as time goes on. The longer we as a people are culturally stunted walking a tightrope of legal bureaucracy established and maintained to protect monopoly and corporate profit the more of our history we lose, and the more of our bonds are lost or never formed amongst one another in common knowledge. But because the suffering is scattered across our collective conscious, and because it requires an understanding of how information and culture are made beyond the average wit, the movement is limited and rife with a never-ending uphill battle against one another rather than against the aggressors, because we were all raised in this system and to see outside it requires great effort and a sacrifice of established ethos many are not willing to engage in.<p>It is the same outside thought that kept slavery the norm, or subjugated women, or made great thinkers like Giordano Bruno heretics to be burned rather than celebrated. People are born into systems of oppression and will fight for them because it is what they know, even if it is to us now what is not right. And I firmly believe intellectual property protectionism falls into that history of oppression - much more muted, much less immediately harmful, but backwards and self-defeatist all the same.