…for highlighting something that isn’t normally discussed outside of tech-circles. The Left’s biggest supporters, other than the litigation industry, is Hollywood. Ever since the Betamax decision expanded consumer fair-use rights, they have ceaselessly chipped away at them again.

Consumer fair-use rights should be a conservative issue. Current anti-copyright-infringement laws and anti-circumvention laws represent government intrusion into our lives to protect the interests of Hollywood plutocrats who have bought our government.

I will never understand conservatives who jump in bed with the MPAA and RIAA (such as Orin Hatch, who suggested once that the RIAA should be allowed to remotely physically destroy computers hosting illicit downloads). Their support for the left is, as it will always be, unwavering. In return, they get legislation that criminalizes behavior that was constitutionally guaranteed in the era of Betamax/VHS tapes. Starting with the NET act and culminating in the outrageous DMCA (authored by Sen. Fritz “Disney” Hollings and signed into law by Pres. Clinton), our right to decide what to do with media we have bought and paid for is being disrupted for no perceivable public good, but only for the benefit of people whose sole goal is to spread an ideology that is parasitic and ultimately destructive.

Some conservatives (all that I know, in fact), are more inclined to see this as a capitalism issue; in other words, preserving the right of a corporation or media cartel to control and profit from the flow of media content is ultimately helpful and productive.

I disagree. Since the control of media content is not technologically feasible, the media cartels have turned to government to protect via criminal law a business model that is unsustainable. The true conservative, capitalist response is get the government (and thus the courts’) hands off of content distribution and allow the media cartels to thrive or extinguish on their own merits. Like they did two decades ago.

Sorry for the long rant. Long-time lurker, but I get really passionate about fair-use rights.

There are thousands and thousands of creative works out there that have gone out of print/out of production that will be lost forever simply because Disney doesn’t want to lose the copyright on Mickey Mouse and lobbies Congress for yet another copyright extension whenever it gets close. This is an enormous contributor to the following from wikipedia on public domain: “It is estimated that currently, of all the books found in the world’s libraries, only about 15% are in the public domain, even though only 10% of all books are still in print; the remaining 75% are books which remain unavailable because they are still under copyright protection.”

Since copyright law was changed in 1964 to automatically renew for a full now-95 years, no works have automatically entered the public domain since 1992, which is when the initial unextended 28-year copyright for works prior to then ran out.

Very few audio recordings have automatically entered the public domain. Under current law, any audio recordings made before 1972 will not enter the public domain until 2067. Nothing made after 1972 will enter the public domain before 2043, and nothing in any significant quantity will enter the public domain before 2048.

No computer program or software ever written has ever automatically entered the public domain.

Originally copyrights were for 14 years, but could be extended another 14 years. While this seems unreasonably short nowadays, certainly we’ve gone too far the other way: life of the author plus 70 or 95 years, depending on the details.

It may be a failed model.

“Hollywood should remember the principle underlying the case against China: Centralized control stifles a market.”

But it is the one they idealize.