In my view, a utopian society produces a lot of high-quality art, which everyone is free to consume, to study, to modify and to share with a friend.
Laws concerning art should get us as close to that society as possible. We should value both our freedoms and plentiful art, not just the latter as you seem to be arguing.
Copyright and patents are a compromise: since there are no effective business models that generate high-quality liberated content, we will make do with high-quality restricted content instead. It's the poverty mentality: since we can't have both our freedoms and high-quality content, we'll take just the latter.
Increasingly, though, the premise of that compromise is no longer true. Thanks largely to the Internet, more and more businesses are successfully generating high-quality open source software, and more and more artists are distributing high-quality art that they encourage people to be creative with.
Since we don't need that compromise as much any more, one would expect to see IP laws get gradually less and less restrictive. Every year, we should be seeing fair use getting expanded, copyright terms getting shorter and software patents getting weaker. We don't need to abolish copyright and patents all at once, until we find good enough business models that are widely applicable. But we certainly don't need more laws like SOPA.
> "But some things are not changing. Good content does not create itself. Most of the time, the best content is not created by hobbyists working in their spare time, either. We've been trying this experiment for a while now, and everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture: while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards."
I suggest you familiarise yourself much more with open source software. I would argue that the best operating system kernels, the best browsers, the best servers, the best programming languages, the best databases, the best virtualization software and the best media players are all open source. Most of these (such as Linux, Apache, Firefox, Chrome, Hadoop, etc) are not developed solely by "hobbyists", but primarily but by fully-paid developers. The same goes for books: a lot of O'Reilly's books nowadays are licensed freely, and yet they still make a profit. These products are definitely very good by professional standards. Computer engineers were the first to catch on to these business models, but they will spread to other types of art, just as the Internet is spreading across domains. The law should embrace this change, not resist it.
Laws concerning art should get us as close to that society as possible. We should value both our freedoms and plentiful art, not just the latter as you seem to be arguing.
Copyright and patents are a compromise: since there are no effective business models that generate high-quality liberated content, we will make do with high-quality restricted content instead. It's the poverty mentality: since we can't have both our freedoms and high-quality content, we'll take just the latter.
Increasingly, though, the premise of that compromise is no longer true. Thanks largely to the Internet, more and more businesses are successfully generating high-quality open source software, and more and more artists are distributing high-quality art that they encourage people to be creative with.
Since we don't need that compromise as much any more, one would expect to see IP laws get gradually less and less restrictive. Every year, we should be seeing fair use getting expanded, copyright terms getting shorter and software patents getting weaker. We don't need to abolish copyright and patents all at once, until we find good enough business models that are widely applicable. But we certainly don't need more laws like SOPA.
> "But some things are not changing. Good content does not create itself. Most of the time, the best content is not created by hobbyists working in their spare time, either. We've been trying this experiment for a while now, and everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture: while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards."
I suggest you familiarise yourself much more with open source software. I would argue that the best operating system kernels, the best browsers, the best servers, the best programming languages, the best databases, the best virtualization software and the best media players are all open source. Most of these (such as Linux, Apache, Firefox, Chrome, Hadoop, etc) are not developed solely by "hobbyists", but primarily but by fully-paid developers. The same goes for books: a lot of O'Reilly's books nowadays are licensed freely, and yet they still make a profit. These products are definitely very good by professional standards. Computer engineers were the first to catch on to these business models, but they will spread to other types of art, just as the Internet is spreading across domains. The law should embrace this change, not resist it.