DISQUS

MikeT · 2 years ago

There are a lot of things parents can do to protect their kids. Unfortunately, they require parents to be fairly intrusive with their kids, and to learn about how technology works. What we really face today is a lot of parents who don't want to rise to the challenge and risk having their kids think that they're mean or controlling. How hard is it to keep computers out of your kids' rooms and only in common areas, for example?

Don Marti · 2 years ago

Congress subsidizes the creation of violent and indecent content by offering the same copyright term to those kinds of content as to others. If Congress wanted to discourage violent movies or games without censoring them, it could simply cut back the length of copyright to a year or two for "NC-17" or "MA" content.

Adam Thierer · 2 years ago

Don... I'm sorry, but I find that argument absolutely ludicrous. It's the same argument I hear some social conservatives occasionally put forward about porn. If we just revoke copyright protections, they argue, the market for adult entertainment will dry up. PUH-LEASE!

The reality is that violent movies and games get produced because there exists strong ongoing demand for such fare. There always has. Go back and read the debates Plato and Aristotle had about violence in Greek tragedies. It's an old story.

Now it may be the case that not quite as much of that content would be produced if copyright was revoked, but it's quite another thing to argue that such material would just go away. Not gunna happen.

Tim Lee · 2 years ago

Now it may be the case that not quite as much of that content would be produced if copyright was revoked, but it's quite another thing to argue that such material would just go away. Not gunna happen.

Adam, haven't you just endorsed the view of the David Levines of the world here? If the effect of revoking copyright would merely be that "not quite as much content would be produced," why have copyright at all?

To the contrary, I think Don's proposal would have a strong negative impact on the market for violent works, which is precisely why I'm opposed to it. I don't want to put the government in charge of picking and choosing whose content is worthy of copyright protection and whose isn't.

Adam Thierer · 2 years ago

There are certain types of content that, regardless of the level of copyright protection, I think we can be fairly certain will continue to have a large audience and, therefore, a reasonably large supply of producers. The creators of those works would not be able to secure their creations from unauthorized reproduction or ensure that they receive renumeration for their creative efforts. Nonetheless, a lot of it would still likely be produced.

At the margin, a proposal to revoke or weaken copyright for certain forms of expression that were considered objectionable might have a small impact on the overall volume of that activity, but not much. In the case of pornography, it would be negligible; almost non-existent. In the case of violent fare, we might not get "Friday the 13th, Part 8," but we'd still get a lot of other slasher flicks. Whether we got something really creative (and expensive to produce) like a Tarantino or Robert Rodriquez flick is another story, and an issue worth debating. (I'm assuming that most of their movies would be exempt from copyright protection under Don's proposal).

But this is all irrelevant to me. The principle of the matter is simple: We should not allow the government to use copyright as a tool of censorship, regardless of how effective it would be in practice.

Don Marti · 2 years ago

Tim, that's like saying that you don't think the government should subsidize "student loans" and "sitting on the porch drinking beer loans" differently. The government is always going to encourage some activities and discourage others. Where the activities involve the media business, the copyright program, one of the Article 1 Section 8 economic powers of Congress, is a tool that the government can use to do it without censoring speech.

(I think that the violent movies would actually get better, since directors would get to do them purely for theater viewing and ignore the DVD market.)

Don Marti · 2 years ago

Adam, the Constitution, in Article 1 Section 8, also allows Congress to grant letters of marque and reprisal. (It's three clauses down from the copyright clause). But depriving you of a copyright isn't "censorship" any more than refusing to charter your ship as a privateer is a regulatory taking.

Tim Lee · 2 years ago

So Adam, you're take is that the quantity of violent movies wouldn't change very much, but that the movies would have lower budgets and therefore lower quality?

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