Yea, you're deliberately mis-aligning the analogy there.

Scrapping anachronistic laws is not the same as scrapping anachronistic institutions.

The equivalent to abolishing the church in this case would not be scrapping IP law, but abolishing the corporations behind it.

Anyway, I've said enough here.

In a nutshell though, "easy to explain" because "it's not that different from the existing system" is not a terribly inspiring philosophical basis for creating policy, and is a propaganda own-goal because it reinforces copyright-lobby frames.

Take that on board, or don't. I'm off.

It's not that I don't think people would be willing to pay voluntarily given appropriate opportunities to do so. In fact I think this is essentially what happens at the moment. It's that I think removing copyright on commercial use would remove these opportunities. Companies try to make as much profit as possible, and they work on two fronts to achieve this--maximising income and minimising expenditure. Where there is significant competition, they have to do this to survive. If there's not significant competition, they still do it anyway. Given the choice of contributing money to something or not contributing money to something, they will choose not contributing money except where they can generate more in income from publicity than they pay (i.e. if they can pay a relatively insignificant amount and hype it up). Because of this, if we didn't have copyright on commercial use, I don't think theatres, video stores, or retail outlets would contribute significant amounts of money upstream.

Re insurance, I've found this on Wikipedia (which suggests it wasn't insurance for copyright claims that was the problem):Not sure if this is true, but in any case, I still suspect copyright is a motivator for movies in the first place, and I also suspect that significantly reducing copyright, i.e. down to 10-15 years, would probably help in this area.

Yup, it would be good to have a widely supported searchable user friendly secure open standard for peer-to-peer payments over the Internet for this sort of thing. Unfortunately we don't have this at the moment. Rather it seem to me that we're transitioning from physical distribution controlled by a few big players to electronic distribution controlled by even fewer and even bigger players (like iTunes), with DRM and surveillance.

What you've been saying about uncertainty cuts both ways, and in selling a change to the public, it's not enough to ask for proof that the status quo is a good idea, we have to offer proof that change is a good idea. For me, attacks on personal liberty like the Skynet act are top priority. I don't want to risk overreaching for something that I see as less important.

Which happens to be exactly what I've been developing, Chaos Storm Cloud is second only to my computational chemistry project which Vic Uni is trying to pass off as their research.
Chaos Storm Cloud is based on the only genuinely secure cryptography system that can't be broken this century, it can't be hacked unlike quantum cryptography, it has a market system with the banking based on a customised crypto system that has 13 years of solid research behind every function.
The previous p2p distribution system has inspired my friend's PHd topic in maths at auckland uni, the current p2p system is protected from a known flaw in the rival bitcoin network banking cryptography relating to distributed attacks.

This is slated for release in 2012 for android, with access to source code subject to programmers not passing off as "their own" commercial project, like Vic Uni is trying to do with my computational chemistry research.

As for DRM, mathematically it is stupid to lock a safe with the keys taped to the door. So DRM will be permitted iff it isn't copyrighted and iff circumvention is permitted. Any abuse of DRM by traders will be punished as causing grief to consumers.

Here's another, weaker proposal: (since this is supposed to be about formulating several different proposals)

copyright should cover:
A) in the case of derived works and critiques - only commercial use
B) in the case of copies with no derivations - only commercial use, and noncommercial use on a commercial scale.

"commercial scale" possibly defined as when financial savings dwarf the added convenience, possibly something else.

I think we still need more proposals between "copyright may as well be infinite" and "we want everything for free". What are some categories of non-commercial use which are most important to free up?

Do you mean a site like The Pirate Bay that indexes hash codes of files? (Have I got this right?) You don't need to allow receiving advertising money for conveying (or even for linking to copies) for this, right? You only need to allow receiving advertising money for providing hash codes? If I've got this right, then I think disallowing receiving money for conveying as such isn't a problem.

I think the idea of copyright as a moral right depends on copyright being virtually eternal and universal. I think if we can get copyright reduced to expire within a generation and only cover commercial use, then the facade will crumble. I think copyright holders already had copyright terms extended to be virtually eternal before non-commercial copying was really an issue, and they got legal rights over non-commercial copying handed to them on a plate when non-commercial copying became possible. Historical happenstance gave them a free ride this time.

Something that it would be good to change if possible at some stage would be making (commercial) copyright just about requiring a payment (either in the form of money or code) for conveying, not about allowing control more broadly. e.g. with Microsoft: When IBM was shipping OS/2 on their machines, Microsoft refused to licence Windows '95 to them; HP (I think) loaded software on their machines to make them more user friendly, and Microsoft required them to return to a default install; Some OEMs wanted to install Netscape and this was disallowed; etc. (Some of?) these were later deemed anti-competitive through the courts, but it would be far better if copyright let companies just pay their money and then do what they want with the work, rather than having copyright allow full control, and then having to go through the courts to determine which specific instances of control are considered anti-competitive.

I notice that the Uppsala Declaration and several pirate parties (including Sweden) suggest copyright shouldn't cover derived works except when they are only slightly different so still essentially the same work. [Edit: Looking at your post again, I guess you're not talking about this?] For me, I can't see how a clear line could be drawn between what is still essentially the same work and what isn't. I think we'd have to say something like if 25% of the work is replaced with 25% new material then we'd consider the work essentially new, and there'd be some point where you had 24% of the work changed, and the full force of copyright would apply, then if you made one more minor change copyright wouldn't apply at all. I think it would be too difficult to judge. We want to legalise non-commercial use anyway, and this would include derivatives. For commercial derivatives I think there's the issue (as above) that copyright holders have a legal right to control rather than payment, so they can ban derivatives, but while I think it would be good to make commercial derivatives possible, I don't think they need to be at no cost.

I think it would probably be less problematic to draw a line between what counts as a commercial scale and what doesn't, but I'd still prefer to avoid this approach (people would have to watch their quotas or something). I think just disallowing receiving money for conveying would be a simpler rule that achieved a satisfactory result.

I'd say the big issue is P2P, and to legalise this we only need to legalise conveying without receiving money, so I think this is what we should aim for.

If our policy is about defending everything using P2P, including when it is only to save a few bucks... that will dominate the discussion and drown out all our actual good policy. Imo it would be much better to adopt a policy that inherently points out the most stupid parts of copyright, like punitive damages, the chilling effect on some forms of freedom of speech, how it hinders creativity and read/write culture, different release dates for different audiences, that sort of thing.

As soon as we say it's not about any of that, but rather that it's about not wanting to pay to watch a new movie. I worry that this will also drown out anything we try to say on software patents, censorship, transparency and privacy. Pirates internationally already say we are far too focused on copyright.

Another point, if we have several narrow policy areas, there is scope for negotiation on them. If we have one big, unpopular, take-it-or-leave-it lump - it will be untouchable and just reinforce the illusion that copyright opponents are just naive greedy people.

I have been worried about this, especially in light of a couple of things I read on creativefreedom.org.nz when I first looked at it a while back:But further looking at the site, other comments seem more accepting of P2P, including this linked from the main page: The Internet is an Opportunity For Artists, Not a Threat (linked). I think perhaps I just stumbled upon a couple of negative posts early on or something, but in any case I'm less concerned about this now. If we can cite support from authors/artists, this is a massive help.

In answering the question 'what's going to happen if we do this?', we can point out that P2P has been effectively legal since it's been around (in the sense that the law has not effectively prevented it), so practically speaking, in terms of economics, people needn't worry that we're promoting a radical change.

And on the other side of the coin, I think this is an issue that we may potentially be able to get good support from. Looking at Wikipedia's page on the Pirate Party of Sweden, there's a graph of membership, and P2P related events have been responsible for significant increases in membership.

And all we have to do is prolong/entrench this ineffectiveness by changing the burden of proof, stopping punitive damages, and creating exceptions. Even complete copyright abolitionists don't want the message to be "you're an idiot if you actually pay for content", just that you won't get screwed over for no good reason.

I'm concerned that as long as non-commercial copying is technically illegal, copyright maximalists have leverage here because they can argue that people are getting away with breaking the law. I don't want the message to be that people shouldn't pay for works that they find useful or enjoyable, if they are able to do so, but I still think it could be worthwhile going beyond burden of proof, etc., to say the law shouldn't cover non-commercial use, if we can cite support from authors/artists on this.

And i'm concerned that we would be giving up OUR leverage to say "they want to censor people's ideas (derivations), keep people in the dark (material not legally available), make profits from punitive damages (where does that $15,000 go?), and exempt themselves from the rule of law (with infringement notices being declared in law to be true, rather than as decided based on evidence).