Reply To: Political Statements
I don’t get the impression that the EFF is advocating the elimination of copyright. Copyright needs to be limited, both in scope (fair use) and duration; otherwise, it stifles creators. There’s a happy medium, and the copyright cartels (MPAA, RIAA, the PROs, etc.) are on the wrong side of it.
For the record, there’s a healthy market for works in the public domain; people still pay money for physical and electronic copies of books that were written centuries ago, even though free ebooks of those same books are readily available. Similarly, there’s a healthy market for copyrighted derivative works of public domain works: recent recordings of performances of works by long-dead performers, films based on Renaissance plays based in turn on works by ancient and medieval historians, etc. If the corporate heirs of Saxo Grammaticus had still held exclusive rights to Gesta Danorum, we probably wouldn’t have Hamlet.