Jumping the licensing shark

> I think you'd be shocked by the consequences ...

Maybe. But it isn't written in stone that the current scheme of "artificial scarcity" via copyright is the only way, or even the best way, to arrange things. That one cannot think of any other consequence than some kind of dystopia if the current regime is changed, belies a lack of imagination rather than a true lack of alternatives. Unfortunately we don't have alternative universes to perform experiments in, so nobody really knows for sure what the space of possible outcomes (emphasis on the plural!) are.

> It's NATURAL for copying to be an expensive activity, not a cheap one - that's how it's been for pretty much all of recorded history.

I'm genuinely curious how you can think of copying information being expensive is NATURAL. How do you define natural? Did cavemen pay royalties when they were retelling stories because that's the natural way to compensate whoever originally came up with the story?

And which is the NATURAL state of things? Before writing, disseminating information was very inefficient (telling stories by the fire?), though I guess back then there wasn't much of a money economy either so it's hard to say what the cost was. After writing was invented, when copying was very time-consuming, was that the natural state of things? Or after the printing press was invented, which dramatically reduced the cost of copying? Or the current state, where thanks to digital technologies the cost of copying has further reduced dramatically? I would claim that there is no 'natural' state, but rather the cost of copying is a function of the available technology. And further, our current copyright regime was something that was invented roughly in the age of the printing press, and worked passably in that world. There's zero evidence that it's the "optimal" for the current state of technology, or for that matter that it would have been better than what historically happened in the age before the printing press was invented.

> You've just destroyed authors, musicians, software writers, anybody's hopes of making money.

In context (that you were proposing lifelong copyright terms, renewable for the lives of heirs, indefinitely: i.e. infinitely long copyright terms, in effect), this is ridiculous. Almost all income from almost all copyrighted works occurs in the first decade: after that it's minimal except for a very few very famous works (think LOTR or Charles Dickens or something like that). For computer software it is effectively nil -- but that won't stop corporate owners, in particular, from automatically renewing just in case and because it's the way it's always been done and because it might just possibly hurt some competitors somehow. And meanwhile you just destroyed what little remains of the public domain, while providing more or less zero incentive to authors to create new works.

In any case, why do you need an infinitely-long income stream to provide incentive? Why isn't a much shorter stream adequate? I don't know about you, but in my job I don't expect to get paid forever for work I do only once, and definitely I don't expect my heirs to ever get paid for work I did. Nor should anyone. That way lies increased concentration of unearned wealth, feudalism and the divine right of copyright holders, not a democratic society. IMHO it should be *impossible* to pass on copyrights to your heirs, not the default state. Tough luck on writers who die shortly after writing a book, but, well, it's not like they're going to be incentivized any more, they're *dead*, so that argument falls at once.

Now maybe indefinite renewal is acceptable if coupled with an exponentially-rising renewal cost, but even that runs the risk of lobbying to eliminate the cost rise while keeping the indefinite renewal. Simply banning it and limiting copyright (particularly of software) to something sane (10, 15 years, something like that) seems a lot more sensible, and a lot more in line with how people *actually* treat it (very few people think that grabbing still-in-copyright 1980s software off abandonware sites is in any way unethical, even if it's technically illegal: it's not on sale any more, you can't buy it, it's of archaeological interest).