Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.
That seems bad but also not super relevant to the point under discussion! Unless your point is that it’s bad when a cultural commons is exploited for business profits – in which case, I agree, but, well…
It’s as relevant as we make it in our discussion, no? You brought up the theoretical noble intentions of the copyrights, so I felt compelled to mention their actual results.
I mean, it seems like you’re reading my argument as a defense of copyright as a concept. I’m ambivalent on the goodness or badness of copyright law in the abstract. Like a lot of laws, it’s probably not the ideal way to fix the issue it was designed to solve, and it comes with (many) issues of its own, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’d be better off if we just got rid of it wholesale and left the rest of society as is. (We would probably be left with excitingly new and different problems.)
As I see it, the actual issue at hand with all of this is that people are exploiting the labor/art/culture of others in order to make a profit for themselves at the expense of the people affected. Sometimes copyright is a tool to facilitate that exploitation, and sometimes it’s a tool that protects people from it. To paraphrase Dan Olson, the problem is what people are doing to others, not that the law they’re using to do it is called “copyright.”
