grandparent said that he disagreed with people being imprisoned or fined for copyright infringement.
Those are punishments.
Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute.
Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to require someone to pay up is a bad idea too.
That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.
> That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.
Except then you have to have a great big state bureaucracy to arbitrarily allocate tax funds.
No, the correct solution is still free information - but all it takes is a change of perspective and mindset on the parts of content creators.
You have a valuable, scarce, useful asset. It is not the infinitely reproducible digital information at the end of the process that you use a legal framework to restrict distribution of. People want that, but information is no longer scarce, and to try to restrict it is unethical.
The valuable resource you have is your creativity. Your ability to produce that digital information is a scarce resource that few possess. The current model that most creators pursue is that an investor of some sort seeks to take advantage of the arbitrage the artificial implications that copyright imparts upon free markets to profit off the perpetual legal ownership of information, and pays you either a fixed salary or a fraction of the returns to actually produce the work, in exchange for the up front funding.
Kickstarter, patreon, gittip, etc are demonstrating the ability for consumers of information to also pay the scarce resource - the creation - themselves. And it would make a lot more sense for consumers to just pay for the culture they want to be made directly, and then everyone can experience it - rather than having some state institution doing it.
No, those current platforms are not appropriate to replace copyright. Of course they are not. They exist under copyright. We cannot conceive of what it would look like to have a legitimate free culture patronage service because one cannot exist right now. But I wrote this post and a bunch of others and keep debating the topic because I fundamentally have faith it would work, and that the ongoing cultural death of western civilization since the advent of perpetual copyright is much more detrimental to society than the free availability of Jersey Shore.
I think I could support such a thing. But I also think GGP needs to come up with something better than "no criminal punishment for interfering with another's profit" to support it. That cuts far too wide to be plausible, I think. Why not this more narrow and, I think, more obvious claim? Prison is disproportionate to the harm caused by copyright infringement.
Those are punishments.
Asking the violator to cough up the retail price of the pirated product on the other hand wouldn't be a punishment for criminal acts, it would be solving a civil dispute.
Of course making this work at scale is not something that can be done in courts. And making unilateral claims sufficient to require someone to pay up is a bad idea too.
That's why some propose a general copyright levy, or a "culture tax" that gets redistributed to producers.