Other stimulating measures (updated)  

I'm really glad to see a piece that offers some suggestions for how to do without copyright. A few obvservations and reiterations:

The idea of originality and owning content is peculiar to the past couple centuries of Western civ, in particular it's an outgrowth of the whole Romantic movement in art. This conception of creation as such an inward and personal act (and of our various works as possessions) has to be the biggest barrier to any kind of change in copyright law, because copyright law is just its outward manifestation. I don't know how our ideas about this could change (it's certainly hard for me to imagine), or whether it would even be a good thing if they did, but it does seem to be a prerequisite for this kind of major shift in law.

For example, if the first of the article's suggestions were implemented, there wouldn't be any protections for anybody's writing anywhere. So if this post were immediately siezed and republished elsewhere, I would have no recourse in the law, even if whoever seized the content made a lot of money selling ads, etc. This is a serious problem for the claim that "the first to market has a time and attention advantage," since presumably attention will have more to do with some kind of preexisting reading habits, and small voices or voices without some privileged position (on the internet or otherwise) may get lost or simply appropriated wholesale. This is why I think the idea that the market will simply work things out fairly is a little naive. The blogosphere, which in a way is a sort of copyright-free zone, deals with this problem through a kind of honor-system of attribution that seems successful and helps spread the love around. In the absence of this kind of system, though, content creators become less powerful than aggregators, since they can't even control their own content. Note that this only matters if we have this idea of content creation as some kind of privileged act, per the romantics, but again that idea seems so central that we (or at least I) will have a hard time giving it up. (By the way, I should say that by proposing the above example about this post I am not by any means trying to suggest that this post or this blog are art; I do however think the article fails to draw a line between art and non-art, and that furthermore that line will be somewhere between highly problematic and impossible to draw.)

I think the article's second and third suggestions -- for the one year usufruct protecting works that require a large capital investment and the societal support of works that are unpopular respectively -- are pretty poorly fleshed out, and seem kind of lamely policy-oriented coming in the shadow of that first suggestion. I don't think the ideas are necessarily bad, but they do seem kind of tacked-on, and I wonder whether more revolutionary ideas might be needed here. The usufruct in particular seems unenforcable in a digital world, and while it might be a little embarassing to proponents, I think it's pretty obvious that the push for a copyright-free world is as much about the recording industry's enforcement problems as it is about some kind of liberal (or is it Marxist?) ideal for content.

CLARIFICATION: Just to clarify one of those twisted parentheticals above: I don't think the article failed by not drawing a line between art and non-art content; rather I think it missed a great opportunity to describe some of the difficulties in drawing such a line in the first place. The article is actually quite vague about the issue, or at least it focuses primarily on art, when actually it's almost impossible to draw a distinction between art and non-art content (imagine the difficulties you'd encounter if you made copyright applicable only to non-art). The point is that any reimagining of copyright will have to apply equally to all kinds of content production, from the journalistic to the technical to the whimsical.