Originally posted by: boris

We live in a capitalistic world Karyudo

That's good to hear! So there will no longer be any artificially-created monopolies legislated into existence? Now anybody can take a commercial product, make it better, and sell it? That's "market forces;" that's capitalism.

Copyright is a wholly artificial construct that actually works against free-market capitalism -- originally for the common good. It originally struck a fair deal for content producers: they would get a limited, legislated monopoly period in which to make their money, in exchange for releasing their work publically and letting it enter the public domain at some point. Whereupon it could be "ripped, mixed, and burned" into whatever the next round of content producers felt like using it for, regardless of how the original creator felt.

Now, huge, multi-billion-dollar corporations use copyright to quash any and all innovation by anyone other than people they deign to "approve".

And that is bullsh!t.

You can see just how ludicrous it is to let original creators control works indefinitely and arbitrarily (like Lucas controls Star Wars) if you consider the other big branch of intellectual property: patents. How insane would it be if designers and engineers had to bend to the whims of the inventor of something like the laser? Someone proposes using a laser to play optical discs, but the inventor of the laser says no, so that's it. Or, the CD player's invented, sold for a few years, and then the laser inventor declares that he's decided that nobody can use his invention anymore, so all CD players are now illegal. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

If Star Wars were covered by a patent, it would have run out by about 1994, entered the public domain, and George Lucas would have had to either come up with newer, better ways of marketing the same exact copies of Star Wars that everyone else could produce (possibly for cheaper), or he'd have had to go back to the drawing board and make up something newly-patentable that people wanted.