Culture Should Be King

Cory Doctorow has an interesting piece on the Locus Magazine website: Why I Copyfight about copyright and culture.  My own personal views on copyright usually place me in the outs with both copyholders and pirates.  I firmly believe we need some significant copyright reform to free up copyholders' stranglehold on their content's use to define our culture and general creative evolution.  However, sorry pirates, copying perfect (or near perfect) content for your own personal use or to sell is stealing, plain and simple.  Illegally downloading a newly released music single or movie is akin to pocketing a CD or DVD from a brick and mortar store.  Is the issue black and white?  Nope.  Should there be a place for fair use?  Most definitely, and a much broader place then exists now.  Should copyright persist on content as long as the copyright laws define now?  No way.

Content creators deserve control and compensation for their works; but those works should fall into the public domain much sooner than it does now, and should be based on the creator's continued development of that material or derived works.  George Lucas should continue to profit from Star Wars for decades.  However, if he doesn't continue to develop the material for, say twenty years, maybe the work should fall into the public domain for others to develop and contribute to the culture.

Content feeds culture.  We need to be inspired from modern-day Shakespeares, and eventually build them their works; but our creators need to eat as much as the culture.  There's a sweet spot in this battle that I don't think we've found yet and I'm afraid that both sides are so polarized and entrenched in their positions that neither are exploring where the line should be set.