What I’m really trying to argue here is that while copyright was handy to prevent rogue publishers from buying books on the day they came out and selling competing copies a few days later, when it comes to digital media, we really owe it to ourselves to be more creative. The web offers this incredible chance to reach an audience of unprecedented size — the main concern is getting people to be interested in the first place given a sea of options.

I really took the CEO of Stardock seriously when he posted about piracy. I mean, it’s great that your friends are musicians and are creating music. It really is. But it sounds like they’re spending a bunch of their time trying to prevent people from pirating their work…time that *could* be spent making more music. And that’s a shame, because I’d guess that they’re not going to see a fraction of the extra sales from fighting piracy that they would from just doing what they do best: being musicians.

In the end, I expect my position will remain that the brilliant people out there making great art shouldn’t redirect their efforts to doing something they probably suck at: fighting people who want to copy their stuff. Maybe it *has* to be this way, and the world in 50 years will *still* have the music industry suing people who shared 12 songs online for millions of dollars. But ya know what? I’m betting not. I’m betting people are going to come up with business models that make good use of the internet and free copying, rather than fighting it. I’d rather be part of the crowd looking forward than the folks clinging to copyright for protection in a time where it offers very little.

thanks for writing this. While i can appreciate your point of view, i can’t say i agree with it. It’s almost an “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” outlook.

I’ve spoken with many ’struggling’ artists who have had their work stolen…and many of them have been successful in having the infringing party remove the work they did not have the permission to use. None of the people i spoke with had to get a lawyer to handle the matter.

Artists pour their heart and soul into their work, and they have every right to own the copyright to it. I would argue that copyright does benefit them.

thanks :)