Copyrights and who benefits

I follow the fringes of the ongoing copyright & open source information battles and find that it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for the multi-billion dollar entertainment and software companies. I'm sure they're not the only companies affected, they're the ones who leap to mind first. I read a good article ("Who "Owns" Electronic Texts?" by Tharon Howard) a few years ago that explained the basics of how copyright law began and its original intent.

According to Howard's article, copyrights were never designed to protect the author/artists/designers' rights but the rights of the publishers. From what I understand from reading this Freepress article, patents were developed more along the idea of protecting the inventor. I don't know if patents are used in the entertainment industry but they are in the software industry.

The basis for copyright law originated in the 16th century and it seems the mindset hasn't really changed all that much. I'm all for compensating an artist for use of her/his materials and ideas but copyright law doesn't have the artist in mind as the primary beneficiary. I don't know but making any sort of serious and meaningful change is going to require a radical shift in how we think about shared information.

There is a small movement starting around open source information but it doesn't have any sort of official name/website and I wasn't able to find the links, but it's looking at the way we think about information & copyrights and trying to devise new frameworks. From what I understand of this new field of thought, there is interest in restructuring our information sharing in a way that's similar to open-source software. Obviously, this way of thinking directly contradicts the capitalist mindset so it probably hasn't gained a huge amount of support so far.

Here are some resources I found:

• Toward a New Politics of Intellectual Property
• Sold Out (this is pretty old but still looked interesting)
• Digital Enterprise's Intellectual Property resources
• A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net
• The Copyright Grab

It looks like James Boyle and Paula Samuelson are two prominent scholars in the field. I know there are others but they're using different phrases & I couldn't find them. I'll update the post if I can.