From “A Grokster Quid Pro Quo for Copyright “Incumbents”?: Corante > Copyfight > ”

No less than the Economist itself calls for copyright reform. Corante point to an article on The Economist which states: “A first, useful step would be a drastic reduction of copyright back to its original terms—14 years, renewable once. This should provide media firms plenty of chance to earn profits, and consumers plenty of opportunity to rip, mix, burn their back catalogues without breaking the law. The Supreme Court has somewhat reluctantly clipped the wings of copyright pirates; it is time for Congress to do the same to the copyright incumbents.”

The Economist is such an enigma to me. At times, radical; others, conservative; but, always, sparkling interesting to read, both for content and style. Of course, this sparks my interest specifically because it relates to me through the research paper “Concentration, Consolidation and Culture – the dialectic over extracting value from social resources in a political economy” that I wrote for Political Economics about the public domain and copyright several years ago.