Link Banana

This month, the libertarian Cato Unbound is discussing copyright. The first two (of four — the others haven’t been posted) essays are rather interesting reading. Rasmus Fliecher kicked off with a rather bleak vision of the future:

The real dispute, once again, is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don’t believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation.

More optimistically, Timothy Lee offers a (radical-sounding) new paradigm:

The starkness with which the copyright debate is often framed reflects a misunderstanding of the function copyright served in the 20th century. Copyright is commonly conceived as a system of restrictions on the copying of creative works. But until recently, it would have been more accurate to describe copyright as governing the commercial exploitation of creative works. From this perspective, the inevitable legalization of non-commercial file sharing looks less like a radical departure from copyright’s past, and more like an incremental adjustment to technological change. It will require the rejection of some misguided policy developments of the last decade, to be sure, but in a sense it will simply restore the common-sense principles of 20th-century copyright law.

(via Matt Yglesias)