Copyrights are a deliberate economic inefficiency whereby an author of a work can make money on a large investment despite the ease of which it can be copied. The problem is, despite distribution basically becoming free, distributors still want the same high cut of the proceeds they used to get from stocking cds or books on bricks and mortar stores.
The other problem is, large companies (Disney in particular) make enough money that they can influence the copy protection mechanism well past its useful life for the benefit of only a few copyright holders such as themselves. Do we really need to copyright material 75 years past the author's life for an author to want to produce a new work? Not likely.
There are two solutions to rent-seeking in general - progressive taxation which is inefficient, or simply reducing the rent-seeking activity. For copyrights I propose to combine them - make companies pay to extend their copyrights. And make them pay more to renew copyrights for every year past the author's death. Those that are not worth extending go to public domain and no longer hurt technological advancement in media delivery. Feel free to extend this idea to lucrative patents as well.
It will not be long before distributors are supplanted by trusted critics simply pointing us to the author's websites directly. Along the way they've made the road rocky for people who invent extremely efficient distribution techniques (p2p, media compression etc.) which are supposed to help overall economic efficiency. We should be as happy about the death of music distributors as we are the death of iceboxes and steam engines. They are simply not required anymore.
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