Well, the Berne Convention has been around since the 1880's, so you have over 100 years worth of arguing to do.
Well... If I argued, even successfully against the points made for this... Convention of law. Then if I failed, then I might profit from the argument I made for longer than I argued about it.
That might be the least useful straw-man argument I've ever made against my own thinking. I'll look into the Berne Convention. I might just not know the justifications for having copyright work this way, and those justifications might actually make sense. I'll find arguments against it before I calcify my opinion on it.
Besides, I don't like the idea of what happened with the "Happy Birthday" song. Luckily that was overturned, because it was ruled that the writers of the song(
Patty Hill and
Mildred J. Hill) had never given the rights to the Warner/Chapel organization.
Also it appears that it was out of copyright for a significant period of time prior to the most recent ruling made upon it.
I tried to formulate an argument against the Berne Convention and found myself making points that were entirely speculation based that do not appear to be supported by current evidence. I don't want copyright to exist forever, that's the best I can do with that argument.
Looking further into it, I see that the argument against copyright as a whole is that it creates artificial scarcity, since it does not deplete finite resources in a meaningful way. Especially with digital technology as it is. There are also questions as to whether copyright has the intended effect of ensuring that authors are paid and recieve work and dues and praise appropriate to the work, however I don't have solid facts on this, and solid facts in such a statement are necessarily scarce because there hasn't been a switch back out of copyright recently enough to know if older(pre-1900) statistics from countries that had not yet implemented copyright laws are still valid.
In any case, it seems that ownership in general is an issue that has non-linearities in economic behaviour when ownership is enhanced or weakened. Unfortunately, it seems that some groups believe that ownership being what made them wealthy and powerful and allowed them to make changes to the world believe that increasing the hold of their ownership would improve their power further.
@jaked:
Yeah, now all we need to do is work antitrust enforcement into these treaties.
I don't get extra notifications if you don't actually quote me, and that's what I pay attention to in the thread, but thanks for the agreement.
I doubt that there are any in the agreements, as this does seem to favour large corporations fairly singularly.