[Peace-discuss] The Fear Surrounding the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Unhealthy

[J.B. Nicholson]

Thanks so much for pointing us to that article, David. From 
https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2020/09/25/the-fear-surrounding-the-death-of-ruth-bader-ginsburg-is-unhealthy/
:

> In Eldred v. Ashcroft, Ginsburg voted to extend copyright
> protections, establishing what Justice Breyer called “perpetual
> copyright”.

It can't be overstated just how wrong Ginsburg was on copyright.
Whether people acknowledge it or not, copyright policy is incredibly
important in your everyday life because so much of your life now
revolves around computers and computer networking (no need for much
detail on this, you're reading this on an email mailing list after
all). Computers copy data and networks facilitate copying between
computers. The opportunities for copyright infringement abound. Being
excluded from computer-based services on mere mention of copyright
infringement (even fraudulent claims) are serious business.

Extending the term of copyright retroactively means extending the term
of copyright for works already published. This alone shows the fraud in
the concept that 'more copyright power incentivizes more work' as one
cannot incentivize authors in the past (including dead authors) -- you
won't get more work out of J. D. Salinger, for instance, no matter how
much you liked "Catcher in the Rye" (a cash cow for the book publisher
that supplies high school students with copies).[1]

Breyer got it right in his dissent to Eldred that we already have most
of the value of an unconstitutional perpetual term of copyright:

> Under the economists’ conservative assumptions, the value of a 95-
> year copyright is slightly more than 99.8% of the value of a
> perpetual copyright. See also Tr. of Oral Arg. 50 (Petitioners’
> statement of the 99.8% figure). If a “life plus 70” term applies, and
> if an author lives 78 years after creation of a work (as with Irving
> Berlin and Alexander’s Ragtime Band), the same assumptions yield a
> figure of 99.996%. 

That means current copyright term is ridiculously overlong and yet big
businesses want more government-granted monopoly over their works (most
notably, hypocritically, Disney, which has made billions off of doing
to other authors what they don't want done to them -- building off of
fairy tales like Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, and so many other
stories).

Quite the opposite of what establishment-friendly justices like
Ginsburg had to say.


[1] One of the best things I did when I was younger was take a high
school English teacher's advice on this book: I read it in school
(probably the only assigned reading I've ever had that I liked and
found hard to put down; I routinely read well beyond the assigned
chapters), I waited 10 years or so and then I re-read the book. The
book didn't change but I certainly had. I discovered that I had just
the opposite reaction to the same book years later; I found the book to
be a tough slog to get through because there's so little to think about
in the work and hardly anything happens which I can identify with. I'm
sure that some movie makers of the future will do a reasonable movie
version of it (despite Salinger's wishes to the contrary) because the
worst books are said to make good movies (or something like that).