Buongiorno, giustamente si parla molto di copyright in questa lista. Sottolineo che ho usato di proposito il /contemporaneo/ e _reazionario_ "copyright" invece del /vecchio/ e _rivoluzionario_ "droit d’auteur"... anche se i francesi e gli italiani si ostinano a usare quel /vecchio/ termine (more on this later?). Sottopongo alla vostra attenzione un saggio *archeologico* di Karl Fogel [1], perché è _solo_ attraverso un'opera di /archeologia/ che si può comprendere come _sicuramente_ l'attuale impianto normativo, sin dal suo concepimento, non ha *mai* avuto a che fare con la tutela dei diritti degli autori... tra l'altro mi pare anche *lampante*, per come il copyrigth è /esperito/ dagli autori stessi. https://questioncopyright.org/promise [2] «The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World» [3] by Karl Fogel --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- [...] copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can and can’t be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which copying and borrowing openly from others’ works is simply a normal part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one’s sources and of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it has always been. None of this will happen, however, if the industry has its way. For three centuries, the publishing industry has been working very hard to obscure copyright’s true origins, and to promote the myth that it was invented by writers and artists. Even today, they continue to campaign for ever stronger laws against sharing, for international treaties that compel all nations to conform to the copyright policies of the strictest, and most of all to make sure the public never asks exactly who this system is meant to help. [...] To read the true history of copyright is to understand just how completely this reaction plays into the industry’s hands. The record companies don’t really care whether they win or lose these lawsuits. In the long run, they don’t even expect to eliminate file sharing. What they’re fighting for is much bigger. They’re fighting to maintain a state of mind, an attitude toward creative work that says someone ought to own products of the mind, and control who can copy them. [...] Copyright is an outgrowth of the privatization of government censorship in sixteenth-century England. There was no uprising of authors suddenly demanding the right to prevent other people from copying their works; far from viewing copying as theft, authors generally regarded it as flattery. The bulk of creative work has always depended, then and now, on a diversity of funding sources: commissions, teaching jobs, grants or stipends, patronage, etc. The introduction of copyright did not change this situation. What it did was allow a particular business model — mass pressings with centralized distribution — to make a few lucky works available to a wider audience, at considerable profit to the distributors. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- ...and much more. Cordiali saluti, 380° [1] https://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/ direttore di https://questioncopyright.org/ [2] disponibile anche in altri formati: https://archive.org/details/TheSurprisingHistoryOfCopyrightAndThePromiseOfAP... [3] apparso la prima volta nel 2004 col titolo ««The promise of a post-copyright world. Report.» https://web.archive.org/web/20080624181625/http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/... -- 380° (Giovanni Biscuolo public alter ego) «Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché» Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but very few check the facts. Ask me about <https://stallmansupport.org>.