As to the article, I linked to it not as a good source, but to raise the question about the case it cites. Do we have real-world examples that we can study to gain a better sense of what the effects of various changes to current copyright law will or will not have?

Are you saying that if sharing is allowed then that possibility can’t exist? Certainly restricting sharing doesn’t lead to more appeal. If sharing is restricted then you better hope you have some lots of money to advertise because restricting sharing is counterproductive to generating appeal. This is the business model that needs to go. It serves the recording industry, not artists.

The NMPA article you linked to is about as biased as it gets. It’s hard to take it seriously. I’d like to believe the debate has at least matured enough to go beyond that garbage.

A few links I’ve been tracking during the last week or so spurred this post. It started with Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post “It’s Time To Rethink Copyright Law.” From there, I followed the comments of Crosbie Fitch and a few links he left. I also followed some trackbacks to TechDirt and Why does everything suck?. If not in the posts themselves, there are certainly comments for these posts that explicitly or implicitly have an abolitionist agenda. I have no idea how wide-spread the movement is, but it’s out there.

I sense you fear that sharing will lead to wiping out income from sales.

Yes, I think that’s a part of my concern. Still, I’m not wed to any particular business model (in theory or principle), I just believe we need to carefully preserve a genuine economic incentive for creators. Granted, the creation must, for whatever reason, appeal to a wide audience to generate any real income, but that possibility must exist. Otherwise, we risk eliminating one of the major incentives for creators to share their creations. (Another incentive, it seems to me, is the assurance that a creator who does share his/her creations will not “lose all control” of that creation … )

Incidentally, a comment on Arrington’s post references the NMPA’s “The Engine of Free Expression: Copyright on the Internet” which offers this quote:

The breakdown of the copyright system in post-Soviet Russia, a nation with a rich history of creative accomplishment, can teach us all a lesson. Just as the strictures of totalitarianism were being removed from the lives of Russian creators, the traditions of copyright protection and enforcement were abandoned. The result has been the utter dissipation of Russia’s creative community. Some creators have fled to the West. Others have been forced to abandon their craft. Either way, the output of creative works has nearly ceased, a sad result for a great culture.

I’d be curious to know the validity of this statement (causality is a tricky beast to cage) and if there are other, similar findings out there. Back to the research …

“preventing people from freely distributing copies of a fixed expression of an idea is unethical” … which doesn’t make any sense to me.”

It makes sense to me. It is unethical to prevent people from sharing their copies of cultural or practical works under copyright. However, I think it is entirely ethical to prevent others from claiming authorship and, for a limited time, selling copies. As well, for certain works, derivation rights are ethical to reserve. What doesn’t make sense to me is the idea that once an author sells (or gives) a copy to a citizen, then that author has a moral right to stop that citizen from sharing copies with others. It is not a moral right nor should it even be a privilege under copyright law.

“The music itself should be the basis of whatever money is generated. If it’s not, then the musician is forced to become something other than a musician”

So a musician who does live performance has been “forced” into being something other than a musician? I’m not understanding why “the music itself should be the basis of whatever money is generated”. If the music is well received, then it will generate income in a variety of ways - in a sense it IS the basis. Why must *sales of copies* be the primary source? As well, allowing sharing doesn’t mean musicians won’t sell copies anyway. Allowing sharing doesn’t deny musicians this right. I sense you fear that sharing will lead to wiping out income from sales.