As the cost to distribute goes down towards zero, the copyright duration periods are increase, allegedly to increase the incentives to create and, equally important to “invest” in the distribution process. The fact is that as distribution costs go down (and they can be almost zero in the digital age) the duration of copyright, logically should be reduced.

The fact is that Windows has an over 100 year copyright duration and when it enters the public domain it will be worthless as a computer program. Then what should we expect, that people will copy and use Windows now, or wait 100 years for it to go into the public domain? Let’s not be naive in our expectations!

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com

aloa

for example MUTE anyone? (not really referral-based but encrypted and anonym)

http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/

Finland’s population (estimated by the CIA) was 5,231,372 in July. Given there are 150,000 active p2p net (no dot) users there, that’s less than 3% of the population. If we even assume (which would be wrong) ALL of them are downloading ALL their music and movies, then the absolute maximum loss for RIAA would be 3% of 0.008% of the world population. Not a big loss on the surface of it.

Finland is a particularly technical country, and pretty strong on individual rights (many of us remember anon.penet.fi) so it’s likely to have a higher percentage of p2p users than most of the world, but anyhow… Assuming (wrong again) that 2.8% of the planet stole ALL their music and movies through downloads, I bet that’s a smaller percentage loss than retailers experience, and they don’t sue everyone who walks in. (Gee, I wonder why.)

I think an encrypted, referral-based p2p system would solve this problem.