Another point on DRM: good music, books, films, tv series become part of who we are. I want to be sure I have can show something that shaped my world-view to young kids in 20, 30 or 50 years time. If I had my music trapped by MS' zune that wouldn't work so well. If Amazon loses the right to some books, they dissappear from my Kindle. Who knows what happens if Apple buys Netflix? I do not want to rent access to my own culture. I want to buy access.
Edit: if it didn't look like nothing will ever enter the public domain again as a result of copyright expiry -- this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
Edit2: It is tragically ironic that Disney, a company founded in part on access to public domain fairytales, is at the forefront of killing the public domain. I imagine our collective digital culture would have been much richer if the terms were still 14+14 years after publication.
Would you support a government-run cultural fund which buys all rights to work from the author at market value for taxpayer money and move it into public domain? E.g. the billboard top song for 2014 was by "Pharrel Williams". Should we pay this Williams e.g. $500,000 so this particular song cannot be locked up by whoever owns the copyright and can possibly hidden away like Disney did with some movies, but returns to those people who enjoyed it in 2014?
Alternatively, this fund could be run by a private entity. What would you pay to outright buy irrevocable permissions world-wide for e.g. "The Capital in 21st Century" which sold 1.5 million copies? It seems like you cannot measure the impact of a book until after it has become a bestseller, so negotiations may be problematic, as the more popular books will end up being expensive.
The "copyright foundation" could I guess, keep selling the books but would need to pay for their future value to the current copyright owner.
I would prefer to just make it illegal to hold private ownership of intellectual property for an unreasonable length of time (eg: longer than 28 years after publication).
I would accept a compromise of some sort of compulsory licensing. You still retain ownership, but after N years you are required to license your IP to anybody who asks for a fixed, predetermined licensing fee.
Edit: if it didn't look like nothing will ever enter the public domain again as a result of copyright expiry -- this wouldn't be as much of an issue.
Edit2: It is tragically ironic that Disney, a company founded in part on access to public domain fairytales, is at the forefront of killing the public domain. I imagine our collective digital culture would have been much richer if the terms were still 14+14 years after publication.