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Some questions and suggestions to all commoners
I’m just back from the 2013 Economics and Commons Conference in Berlin. A great event, in which I took lots of general notes synthesized in another post that I’ll publish tomorrow. This one, instead, contains just questions and suggestions from me that I already shared at the conference, or I’d like to share with everybody interested in Commons. A separate post contains my critique to certain arguments against copyright I heard at the same conference.
On copyright being useless because it's recent
I just attended the 2013 Economics and Commons Conference in Berlin. During the Knowledge stream of that event something came up that has bothered me for a long time: the assertion that copyright is useless also because it’s just a few centuries old, and artists were doing just fine even before, thank you very much. Here is what I would have repeated, if there had been more time during those sessions.
I find this particular argument against copyright very, very weak, to say the least, and I’d really like to see it go, for at least three reasons: