Let me (attempt) to be clear, then. One form of argument that I have used, and apparently failed to articulate, is of the form “copyright is hardly helping at all for these people, THEREFORE it is really not a big deal if we instead pursue a milder rollback.” This does not imply that I support a full overthrow, just that if a party were not injured by a full overthrow, then they certainly wouldn’t be injured by a mild reduction.
I would be another possible example. 100% of my productive output is copyrighted and so I’m firmly in the creation class. Someone wishing to calculate the value of copyright might wish to count me as a beneficiary. And yet copyright is utterly useless for me (and the company I work for). The source code I write is copyrighted, but also a trade secret. It is also of zero value after a decade or two. If the source code were leaked, the company would be having bigger problems than copyright violation on the code. We depend totally on secrecy.
Obviously I am not representative of all creators; just some subset. The point is just that any case that narrows the beneficiaries of copyright also strengthens the case for weakening copyright.
I maintain, as I always have, that copyright should be tuned to maximize the benefit to society. That is the justification laid out in the US Constitution and also the one I support from first principles. The optimum point is obviously somewhere between zero and “infinity.” I posit that the evidence suggests we are already past that optimum point, at least in terms of timeframe. Heck, even Amateur Barbarian agreed with that (back in post #31).
Copyright needs to be rethought through and modernized. The length of copyright is the least of all the “tweaks” it needs. But today’s length will never be rolled back. It’s not going to happen, and it’s silly to discuss copyright on that basis. Rolling it back would require changes to the law in every major western economy simultaneously. It’s a fantasy. Literally every other point is more important.
Copyright is an issue because it is so huge and encompassing. Writers, coders, musicians, artists, photographers, map-makers have wildly disparate needs; solutions that work to benefit some groups might be detrimental to others. In addition, the burden of supporting legacy systems - all those works already in existence - must be taken into account. Government must do this; the historical point of copyright law is that private systems failed utterly. But government must apply laws to all, and must balance creators and consumers. Worse, government is a bad place to argue concepts.
We can argue concepts here. Really, that’s all we can do. I find your statements on those concepts to be… let’s say, deeply flawed. That goes for your first paragraph here as well. Copyright is hugely, enormously helpful to virtually every creator of every type. That’s true for the fact of copyright as well as the length of copyright. I don’t recall any evidence you’ve presented that shows how copyright is “hardly helping” anybody. How do you justify it?
I’m not sure that’s quite true - the idea, or algorithm, had to be described as implemented. I have a few patents of this type, on things that no sane patent system should have granted. (Hey, but my company gave me money for filing.)
However, it is not clear to me if the patent examiners who brought in money by approving applications would have ever caught an “idea” that while described as implemented never actually could be. But that’s a different rant.
To be clear, from a professional point of view, it bothers me greatly if you have a patent that encompasses an idea. I am not so bothered if I have a patent that encompasses an idea.
I did not mean to imply that it was technically permissible to patent ideas and not just the expression. It has never been so. What Alice recognized is that the definition of what constitutes the boundary between idea and expression was too far into the idea territory.
I don’t see this as a real change, so much as the fact that fusty old federal judges are now realizing that the internet doesn’t make public domain activities patentable all by itself. This is not dissimilar to the way in which photocopies and facsimiles were held to be inadmissible until the judges learned more about the technology in question.