Copyright length should be 0. Owners should not be able to use the state to prevent people making copies of text.
These restrictions were scandalous when British parliament legislated them in the "Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" - to favor the printers' guild (1662); and it is scandalous today.
Check out the page for this book on the Internet Archive:
> Reasoning out whether it should exist based on philosophical first principles is largely a dead end.
it is a dead end in the sense that one would not be able to convince a person who does not assume the legitimacy of copy restrictions would not be convinced.
In the US alone, there are ~40,000 full time authors, who are creating a minimum of a $2.4 billion in retail and commercial business transactions every year (based on the $60k median income for authors). Those authors provide the raw material that supports dozens of supporting businesses - publishers, printers, editors, book stores, libraries, critics, and so forth.
This is something that, without copyright, wouldn't exist. Even should patrons step up and provide that $2.4 billion every year for authors (very unlikely, in my opinion), the support industries would disappear.
Without copyright, the value of a book's contents is $0, because the mean cost† for (re)producing it is $0. If a product has no value, you can not create a market for that product. Relatively basic economics.
The ability to create value around a product that has no value of its own requires quite a bit of additional effort. Authors can't hold concerts, after all.
The RIAA's argument in the Napster days is definitely similar, but they were arguing from the point of their production costs not being $0, and copyright is in place, making copying legitimately illegal.
† The cost for the first copy is $30,000 (given a Brandon Sanderson pace), and every subsequent copy costs $0 (give or take a few tiny fractions of a penny).
These restrictions were scandalous when British parliament legislated them in the "Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses" - to favor the printers' guild (1662); and it is scandalous today.
Check out the page for this book on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/winniethepooh01miln
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The article says:
> Reasoning out whether it should exist based on philosophical first principles is largely a dead end.
it is a dead end in the sense that one would not be able to convince a person who does not assume the legitimacy of copy restrictions would not be convinced.