Issues with the current copyright system

The copyright system that is currently applied world-wide has some serious issues.

• For the authors themselves it is rather a lottery game than a reliable way of making a living: you will maybe get famous and rich if you are lucky. And the majority of authors never see a just reward for their efforts.

• The legal infrastructure to maintain this system is expensive and causes increasing costs for our governments. Protecting copyright owners against theft and regulating the use and sharing of digitally published content has become a Sisyphean task, causing absurd laws and requiring hordes of human resources in public administrations.

• It has become counter-productive for creativity. It causes increased administrative work for publishers and distributors, leading to dependencies that hinder creative work and directly influence production workflows.

• It leads to conflicts of interest between individual humans and corporations where the former usually are defeated by the latter because of their different nature.

Some examples where copyright is being misused by private corporations, are documented on Wikipedia.

The TRIPS Agreement, which obliges WTO members to comply with certain standards to protect intellectual property, continues to live despite serious criticism.

The Case Against Patents by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 3-22, (Winter 2013), commented in Comments by Karsten Gerloff and A question of utility in The Economist (Aug 8th 2015).

“Wir sehen jeden Tag, dass Menschen in ressourcenschwachen Ländern an Covid-19 sterben. Es fehlt an vielem: an klinischem Sauerstoff, Schutzkleidung für das Gesundheitspersonal, Medikamenten, Tests und schützenden Impfstoffen. Die Knappheit dieser Ressourcen wird unter anderem auch durch die Monopolisierung und eine künstliche Einschränkung ihrer Verfügbarkeit durch Patente und andere geistige Eigentumsrechte befördert.” Deutschland muss jetzt einer Patentlockerung für Vakzine zustimmen

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? by Glyn Moody, June 2016.

Wikipedia has two articles that overlap partly: Criticism of copyright and Copyright abolition

The topic appears occasionally in controversial Internet discussions:

• Does copyright law limit creativity?

• Do copyright and intellectual property laws harm creativity and innovation?

• Does copyright help or hinder innovation?

Tiit Aleksejev, chairman of Estonian Writer’s Union, suggested (Sirp, September 2022) that increasing the rental fee for book in Estonian national libraries from 10 to 30 eurocent would be helpful. I believe that it wouldn’t. Everybody should pay for the work of writers, not only those who actually read books. The usefulness of a book is quasi unrelated to its popularity. The value of the work of writing books does not depend on how many people actually read the result. There are books that require years of research but are being read only be some experts or will become popular only much later, and there are relatively “useless” but entertaining books that were written by their author as a weekend activity. A good book can increase quality of life in my country because it inspired a few people.

The heirs of Astrid Lindgren had a law suit against those of Wolfgang Franke who wrote the German text of the theme song that became famous with the Pippi Longstocking 1969 TV series. (Source in German: Astrid-Lindgren-Erben gewinnen Urheberrechts-Streit). The whole story would be irrelevant if copyright was just about honour and not about revenue.

Vantablack is a patented coating used to colorize surfaces. Its patent owner, the British company Surrey NanoSystems, granted artist Anish Kapoor exclusive rights to use it in artistic applications, causing other artists to get angry about this monopoly over a substance. (Sources: nature.com 2016-04-26, artforum.com 2016-02-28, dezeen.com 2017-08-16)