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Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour by JoshTriplett on Thursday May 26, 2016 @11:30PM (#11783711)
It seems to me that you've moved the goalposts. I certainly agree that a less broken system of copyright would work better than the one we have. But the question at hand was whether there existed cases in which copyright has harmed works that might thrive more in the absence of copyright, as a part of evaluating whether it makes sense to consider the state of "alternative models" given the current legal system directly supporting the primary copyright model and in many cases harming those alternatives. You've then reasserted that you want the "basic idea" of copyright as a means of dismissing these examples, but that wasn't the question at hand.

In a model without copyright, it wouldn't matter whether a work was derivative, or whether it depended on the "original creative assets"; what would matter is whether people found it useful, interesting, and worth supporting/promoting.

(As for the comment on decentralization of services, I'd agree, but at the same time that particular set of problems also wouldn't exist in the absence of copyright.)

Re:Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour by Silhouette on Thursday May 26, 2016 @11:49PM (#11783786)
I suppose I did move the goalposts, however unintentional it may have been. Yes, what I'm really defending here is the basic premise of copyright. I have no interest in defending copyright that effectively lasts forever, or that has such wide scope that we see billion-dollar lawsuits over work that shouldn't have been covered by copyright in the first place, or other similarly obvious abuses from the relatively recent past.

However, if the underlying question we're asking here is still whether copyright adversely affects other potential economic models for creating and distributing new works, I think my original point remains valid. How would the scenarios you mentioned support alternative model(s) that would be more attractive to creators than what we have (or at least, should have) under some sort of copyright scheme?