Comments on: A Manifesto on the Abolition of Copyright Protections

By: thrica

thrica — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:25:32 +0000

Awesome, let me know what he thinks when he gets back to you!

By: Steven H Campbell

Steven H Campbell — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:32:59 +0000

I read your treatise and forwarded to a friend who is a successful copyright lawyer in Atlanta (He also teaches at Emory). Hopefully he will give us a response!

By: thrica

thrica — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:49:57 +0000

I think movies like Avatar are at this point like the olympic victories of the Communist countries – they’re nice to have, but not worth the cost associated in market terms. The central government poured resources into intense athletic training while everyone else was starving. Not quite as dramatic, but same principle – copyright enables them to do something they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, but at a pretty big cost. Of course, production costs will no doubt continue to fall, so I’m certain that there would continue to be things like that farther in the future.

As for patents, the case is a bit less clear. The maximum of the total utility curve is very close to zero protection for copyrights, just because it’s not hard to monetize creative output in other ways and it’s a lot easier to overdo protections than underdo them. For patents, the maximum is probably farther away, so there’s a better case that “best guess at the optimum” might actually be better than zero protection.

Alternatively, there may not even be a qualitative distinction between patents and copyrights that holds water. In short, I’m still thinking about that one.

By: Alex Capo

Alex Capo — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:15:08 +0000

nice.
do you think it will still be possible to have movies such as avatar or anything with outrageous budgets without copyright laws?
and what do you think about patents and inventors? should they still be protected?

By: thrica

thrica — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 06:07:00 +0000

It was a final paper so I unfortunately didn’t get any feedback on the final. But he liked the idea, and I did well in the class, so it must have been at least ok.