Britney's 'Baby one more time' is copyrighted and afaik always has been. It does not prevent me from playing it on my piano at home.
Well it theoretically prevents you, yes.
It does not stop me from playing it in my band, even performing it to a small audience (for profit).
That'd be illegal (except in case the rightholders and you have reached some agreement to allow it).
so I do benefit from it. I don't have to go through the effort of penning a classic pop song (so time consuming). I cannot on the other hand release an acid house version which world surely be a chart topper making me rich and famous. this is fair because I don't deserve to be rich and famous, least of all for synthesizing a classic. So your example of chiseling a statue seems off. You can do it, you just can't sell it. Makes sense to me.
No.
I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that copyright does not allow all that. I wish it did. It's just that private acts are hard to prosecute, and gratis uses or those involving little money are not profitable to prosecute.
This does not make the acts legal, it just makes it likely that people will get away with doing it.
You can't even buy a Britney Spears CD and play it in a CD player in your shop/bar/barber shop/whatever, because your customers which might not have bought the record could hear it. You can, again, if you get permission from rightholders or authorised intermediaries.
I've heard all sorts of weird stories about collecting societies breaking into private parties because they were playing music without permission. The facts that collecting societies prosecute you does not mean they're right, they also send automated subpoenas for absurd things or anything. But it also doesn't mean that everything they prosecute is legit.
It's quite crazy. That's one of the practical problems of creating monopolies, the monopolists gather power and abuse it.
And property protection is joke anyway. If it weren't China and Korea - to name but a few - would still be agrarian societies.
Oh, yes. I thought we were talking about the theoretical value or hindrance of copyright, patents and those artificial monopolies.
If we're start talking about practicalities then patent offices are blatant jokes (and I won't say what I think to avoid being charged with libel). Some collecting societies are abusers, any litigation is always more burden for the poor, etc. etc. etc.
What do you make of the idea that patents encourage disclosure of trade secrets, thus opening up an industry to competition and innovation once the patent expires?
Theoretically: it was more beneficious for society when it was established. Research was little profitable back then and production/manufacturing was profitable, so little incentive for innovation and less for publication without patents. Nowadays we have too much innovation which is abused to fool consumers into buying unsafe products, accept misfeatures or just take part in markets without the necessary information, because only the wealthiest and specialized players can afford to be up to date. Now we have so many ways to share information, reverse engineer, and derivate more knowledge out of existing one that the problem with rewarding new inventions is that the assessment of novelty becomes impossible. It's much more work to fairly assess whether an invention is new that to come up with an invention. This is generally true, but it is more true in some fields than others. There's also the problem of setting any meaningful threshold on how new something must be to be worth a monopoly.
Practically: Have you read many patents? The claims (which bound the monopoly requested) are written as broad as possible, and the description on how to achieve the invention is written as vague as possible and never detailing how to build all possible claimed processes or apparatuses, let alone proving that they work or what needs to be done for them to work, or what problems, drawbacks or inconveniences the invention may bring. The law requires the patent office to check quality of patents. But the patent offices gets more money the more patents they grant, and the patent holders they interact with are happier, the harmed public is never asked and does hardly ever challenge bogus patents. The system will just assume that useless inventions can be granted patents because their market value will be lower, and the missing published information will be filled by the knowledge of "people skilled in the art". Monopolists get their monopoly and they get to keep their secrets, just the opposite of what theoretically should happen.
Would weakened or lesser copyright law encourage or discourage large monopolistic publishers? On one hand, a small publisher with exclusive rights to a rare 'hit' would be immediately overtaken by a giant. On the other. if customers didn't like the megacorporation with a monopoly on their cultural material, they could get it elsewhere with impunity.
I don't care much what publishers could do. There was once that internet thing where people could publish and cure collections and access works. The useful work that publishers do will I suppose still be done and payed for, and the rent seeking monopolists wouldn't be missed. There are anyway striving publishers who specialize in works whose copyright has expired.
When copyright was stablished very few peple had printing presses, now lots of people have access to (now too centralized) internet and some even have 3D printers. Back then granting monopolies to print stuff was removing rights to very few people. Now it is removing to many people the right to do somethign that is easy and inexpensive to do.
The effort to create a work is not at all proportional with the number of copies that humanity may want to make of it. So rewarding the efoort by paying for each copy does not seem a very good incentive.
The current copyright can also be seen as encouraging publishers to select only blockbusters and live out of them for many years without encouraging more creativity. Or can be seen as being the cause of trends to
have everyone like the same style of work because the publishers can afford more marketing for few works that then sell a lot. Or the trend that many people are just consumers of culture instead of producers.
But I'm not very fundamentally against copyright, I see some theoretical argument for it, it's more the overbroad scope, abuses and the practical difficulties nowadays that the principle itself.
