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But maybe we should have that much copyright for that particular special case. We don't have to pay the same price for everything we buy. A thousand dollars for a new car might be a very good deal. A thousand dollars for a container of milk is a horrible deal. You wouldn't pay the special price for everything you buy in other areas of life. Why do it here?
So we need to look at different kinds of works, and I'd like to propose a way of doing this.
This includes recipes, computer programs, manuals and textbooks, reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias. For all these functional works, I believe that the issues are basically the same as they are for software and the same conclusions apply. People should have the freedom even to publish a modified version because it's very useful to modify functional works. People's needs are not all the same. If I wrote this work to do the job I think needs doing, your idea as a job you want to do may be somewhat different. So you want to modify this work to do what's good for you. At that point, there may be other people who have similar needs to yours, and your modified version might be good for them. Everybody who cooks knows this and has known this for hundreds of years. It's normal to make copies of recipes and hand them out to other people, and it's also normal to change a recipe. If you change the recipe and cook it for your friends and they like eating it, they might ask you, "Could I have the recipe?" Then maybe you'll write down your version and give them copies. That is exactly the same thing that we much later started doing in the free-software community.
So that's one class of work. The second class of work is works whose purpose is to say what certain people think. Talking about those people is their purpose. This includes, say, memoirs, essays of opinion, scientific papers, offers to buy and sell, catalogues of goods for sale. The whole point of those works is that they tell you what somebody thinks or what somebody saw or what somebody believes. To modify them is to misrepresent the authors; so modifying these works is not a socially useful activity. And so verbatim copying is the only thing that people really need to be allowed to do.
The next question is: Should people have the right to do commercial verbatim copying? Or is non-commercial enough? You see, these are two different activities we can distinguish, so that we can consider the questions separately - the right to do non-commercial verbatim copying and the right to do commercial verbatim copying. Well, it might be a good compromise policy to have copyright cover commercial verbatim copying but allow everyone the right to do non-commercial verbatim copying. This way, the copyright on the commercial verbatim copying, as well as on all modified versions - only the author could approve a modified version - would still provide the same revenue stream that it provides now to fund the writing of these works, to whatever extent it does.
By allowing the non-commercial verbatim copying, it means the copyright no longer has to intrude into everybody's home. It becomes an industrial regulation again, easy to enforce and painless, no longer requiring Draconian punishments and informers for the sake of its enforcement. So we get most of the benefit - and avoid most of the horror - of the current system.
The third category of works is aesthetic or entertaining works, where the most important thing is just the sensation of looking at the work. Now for these works, the issue of modification is a very difficult one because on the one hand, there is the idea that these works reflect the vision of an artist and to change them is to mess up that vision. On the other hand, you have the fact that there is the folk process, where a sequence of people modifying a work can sometimes produce a result that is extremely rich. Even when you have artists' producing the works, borrowing from previous works is often very useful. Some of Shakespeare's plays used a story that was taken from some other play. If today's copyright laws had been in effect back then, those plays would have been illegal. So it's a hard question what we should do about publishing modified versions of an aesthetic or an artistic work, and we might have to look for further subdivisions of the category in order to solve this problem. For example, maybe computer game scenarios should be treated one way; maybe everybody should be free to publish modified versions of them. But perhaps a novel should be treated differently; perhaps for that, commercial publication should require an arrangement with the original author.
Now if commercial publication of these aesthetic works is covered by copyright, that will give most of the revenue stream that exists today to support the authors and musicians, to the limited extent that the present system supports them, because it does a very bad job. So that might be a reasonable compromise, just as in the case of the works which represent certain people.
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