Barry Eisler

Over at techdirt.com, best-selling author and former intellectual property lawyer Barry Eisler is talking about Copyright, Piracy And Why SOPA/PIPA Are ‘Extremely Disturbing’.

Copyright terms have grown to be over a century. No reasonable person can claim that, with a term of less than a century, artists wouldn’t be adequately incentivized to create. So current copyright terms are clearly too long from the standpoint of what’s best for society overall. Personally, I think a twenty-five year term would be more than enough. Anyone who claims he wouldn’t bother creating if he could only commercially exploit his creation for a quarter century wasn’t going to create anything worthwhile anyway.

If you are at all interested in this stuff, you really should go read it right away!

Big media companies hate copying, not because it’s stealing (because it’s not), but because it is a form of competition. And competition is always bad when you are guarding a monopoly.