Last week it was reported that GameStop, a clown show of a company peddling meme stocks and cheap video game merchandise, had unceremoniously and without notice shut down Game Informer, a magazine and website that had been publishing in some form since 1991. The decision was a terrible one for many reasons. For readers and […]
No, it is not. Copyright law ensures the original creator gets paid for their work and nobody can imitate it (quite literally “the right to copy”) without permission. Copyright law is about making money.
Heritage law is about preserving history.
Copyright law is precisely a means to an end of encouraging more works to be created (and thus eventually enter the public domain) and absolutely nothing else. In particular, compensation to the creator is nothing but a proverbial “carrot,” not any sort of moral right or entitlement.
It’s also a power of Congress, by the way, which means it’s optional. Congress may enact copyright law if it so chooses, but is not obligated by the constitution to do so. This is in stark contrast to e.g. the Bill of Rights, which is written the opposite way: presuming such rights exist and prohibiting the government from infringing upon them. In other words, if the framers meant for copyright to be an actual “right,” they clearly would’ve plainly said so!
I think you don’t understand the difference between fundamental rights and regular old rights. A right does not have to be fundamental to be a right.
And, if copyright law were about encouraging creation, it would not restrict the use of other peoples’ work.
Would you do me a favour? Read back over this thread until you realise you just argued creation is “encouraged” by a category of law which only restricts the use of other peoples’ work, including modifying it to create derivative works, and has been used as a club against creation to boot. Consider, how does Nintendo kill Smash tourneys? How many YouTube videos have been wrongly DMCA’d?