@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir
Here's a quick history of copyright law:
The Statute of Anne (1710) was the first government-regulated act in the western world and it boiled down to a pact with the printing guilds trading monopoly for censorship.
The U.S. constitution (1787) tried to salvage the idea by granting congress the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". ("useful Arts" meaning maps ant the like)
That's why the Copyright Act of 1790 only protects "maps, charts, and books" but not things like music or newspapers.
Also, it was intentionally designed to allow American to ignore foreign copyrights and that was key to the U.S. becoming the cultural juggernaut that it is today.
(On a side-note, Hollywood is in California because it was beyond the reach of Thomas Edison's patent lawyers.)
From what I remember, the modern scope of copyright involved a chain of legal goalpost-moving where they first managed to argue that a book of sheet music was a book and thus managed to get rid of the "musical compositions aren't protected" and then managed to argue that, because a piece of sheet music is protected, a recording of that sheet music should also be protected.
Examples of things still not copyrightable include clothing designs, jokes, and recipes.
@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir Oh, and I can't remember if it was something I read or something I figured out on my own, but the stupid "I have to be taught to share a ball" argument by a former RIAA or MPAA exec led me to the reason it's so hard to stamp out piracy:
We have an instinctive understanding of scarce (property) vs. non-scarce (information) and an instinctive drive to gather and share non-scarce things for the good of the tribe... that's what gossip is.
@papa@mastodon.sdf.org @sir Rick Falkvinge (founder of the Swedish Pirate Party) wrote some *excellent* articles on TorrentFreak on the topic:
https://torrentfreak.com/author/rick-falkvinge/
He points out things such as how authors and artists are technically entrepreneurs and we should question thoroughly the idea that a special class of entrepreneurs should get to free-ride off a small amount of work for the rest of their lives while no other class of entrepreneurs get to do that.
(Work is supposed to be trading something scarce, like the worker's time, for something scarce, like money. Copies of a recording are non-scarce. Performances are scarce.)