That way the $100 school book that can only be used during one year will cost only $10 and can be used for many years.

It’s time to end the education book racket.

But there are those, like me, that feel that artists (not publishers) should somehow should be compensated or subsidized for their work if that work is of significant value. Anyone can write a worthless poem or song and that author deserves no compensation or subsidy and if the judgement that says it is worthless turns out to be wrong or biased, that can be corrected (appealed). The subsidy can come from the general tax and payment can be based on individual works or based on the authors lifetime work.

Also, because large investments are sometimes made to produce movies an recordings and those investments cannot be recouped in if free commercial copying is allowed, these should be allowed a monopoly of just a few years, no more than 10 to 20 years, depending on the investment made and when the investment was recouped.

“If anything, the publishers should compensate the public for the suspension of their cultural liberty that they have exploited for so long.”

Great idea. Start with the so called music publishers that have collected worthless songs by the millions so as to collects all sorts of blanket license/monopoly/extorsion based royalties. There are billions there.

People are already making good progress in resuming the enjoyment of their natural, cultural liberty. Included within that is the natural right to share and build upon published culture and to be able to exchange one’s labour for whatever the market will bear.

P2PNet is doing an excellent job of pointing out all those situations in which people are being prosecuted or persecuted by publishers for sharing and building upon published works, even before they get around to inviting their audiences to pay them for their labours, e.g. DJing, reviewing, remixing, singing along to, etc.

Human culture has become the controlled property of immortal publishing corporations and they will jealously guard it against any mere mortal who dares assume this commonwealth of knowledge and art as the birthright of Homo Sapiens.

Fortunately, mere mortals are outnumbering the publishers’ hired lawyers, legislators and congressmen. We are seeing a cultural insurgency, and this is why such cultural insurgents as file-sharers and remix artists are being labelled by the publishing cartel as pirates, counterfeiters, and other miscreants pursuing funding for terrorism and other organised crime. They are labelling the people as criminals for doing nothing more than ignoring the publishers’ monopoly, ignoring their unethical privilege of copyright.

So, the abolition of copyright is not suggested as a way of restoring the people’s cultural liberty – because they are already wresting it back – but, as a way to cease the publishers’ continued spiteful and retaliatory persecution of the public.

Now, of course, if one can find alternative ways for publishers to make money other than by suing the public to enforce their unethical monopolies they might undo some of the terrible damage they’ve done to their own reputations. Unfortunately, I don’t think publishers can adapt to the idea of selling art without a monopoly. It’s far too ingrained in their corporate mentality.

However, one can certainly find alternative ways for artists to make money other than by selling their work to publishers. The most obvious way is for artists to sell their work directly to their audience. We are beginning to see this happening already. It will only become an ever more popular business model for artists, given the publishers no longer have an effective monopoly to tempt them with potentially larger payouts (albeit equivalent to loans paid off by lottery wins).

I recognise there are others who like the idea of a tax, i.e. forcing the entire population to pay publishers a colossal bail-out scale compensation for the copies they can no longer sell given their monopoly is no longer effective. You can tell I think a tax is almost as bad as copyright. This is because it would compound the crime of copyright to compensate a publisher because the public have reclaimed the liberty that was confiscated from them to privilege the publisher in the first place. If anything, the publishers should compensate the public for the suspension of their cultural liberty that they have exploited for so long.

How about concentrating on this sentence.
If there are enough ways presented to make money, copyright abolition will be an easier sell.