Vancouver Sun: The case for the Death of Copyright

Vancouver Sun: The case for the Death of Copyright
Jacob Tummon

It has been said that intellectual property law has an unfortunate tendency to “disable critical thought.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than the reasons proffered for copyright in the Internet age, including the refrain that “copying is tantamount to stealing.” That flatly is not the case.

The morality, economics, and practicality of laws dealing with physical property do not hold for the intangible works covered by copyright. With finite physical property, scarcity is inescapable; with digital representations, scarcity does not apply. It is therefore not surprising that reasoning premised on this false analogy yields a law not in the best interests of content creators (“content creator”: means artists, musicians, writers and so forth.)