My beliefs about censorship are well-known. I oppose it in all forms.
To me, copyright laws, are another form of censorship. In their current incarnation, copyright law has become a vehicle for protecting the exclusive rights of various multinational corporations interested only in squeezing intellectual properties for the last few cents possible before being forced to relinquish their stranglehold on these properties.
The main argument that corporations espouse is that copyright laws protect the originator of the idea and helps them protect their intellectual work from theft by those that would either take credit for the work or that would simply seek to profit off of it.
Kind of ironic given the past history of the music industry and their exploitation of musical groups or of a certain cartoon company that made most of its money from making cartoons from classic European fairy tales that have fallen out of copyright protection.
These very entities will hound copyright violators to the ends of the earth if they feel that their property has been used without paying for it.
But thinking more about this I realize that at its core that copyright protection is important to the actual originators and that though corporations are undoubtedly abusing the laws in their favor that copyright protection should exist in some form.
The writers that I know are hard-working people. They don’t get million dollar advances for their efforts. Indeed they have to work for every book that they sell. Sometimes they have to give away e-versions of their books to drum up interest.
These are the people who copyright should be protecting.
Instead of making copyright a tool for the benefit and profit of large corporate entities why not make it more personal and less impersonal? Make it more flexible. Make sure that the rights of the originator are protected but allow others to use and borrow the idea to create new works of art. As long as they credit and share profits with the originator, let others borrow from the idea.
Someone else may take the idea and make it even better, make it something totally different from what was originally intended. Why not let the ideas flow. As long as due credit is shared and the monetary details are ironed out then nothing, lawyers least of all, should stand in the way of creativity.
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