Quote:1- Right to control derivative works is covered by Trademark, not Copyright. Also, despite the constant claims that such a right to control derivative work cripples creativity we seem to live in a world were staggering amounts of creative work are produced all the time.
Nope, trademark is quite different and it works differently. some things are both trademarked and copyrighted (Mickey Mouse), just trademarked (3, the phone company forinstance) or just copyrighted (Lord of the Rings).
Copyright gives you the right to control derivative works, which is why for instance fanfiction.net is possibly illegal (definitly operating deep in the grey zone of the law). It is widely expected to be decalred non-infrining if it ever goes to court but they are dancing a fine line. Fanfiction.net would have to prove that they did not negatively impact book/movie/whatever sales of the work that they would be sued over. A difficult task.
And the very wealth of creative works (again fanfiction.net) is a strong argument for why copyright is not needed for artists (it of course is, people are happy to create without pay, but distribution is quite another matter).
imagine a world where the fanfiction.net authors could charge for stories, how many more would write and how much more would they write for some financial incentive? Of course when charging for something fanfiction.net would take a cut, possibly the rights holders of the thing the fanfic is based on, the credit card processor would charge a fee, etc etc. so it's somewhat infeasible, unless fanfiction.net had a say a subscription model or something.
Quote:2- We don't base all of our decisions based on what is econimically optimal. You want an economically optimal way of running your health care system? The cost of a bullet is less than a dollar.The cost of treating someone for terminal cancer to extend their life for three years is several million dollars.
And a very good example it is, and yet I would argue it is economically optimal to take care of someone with terminal cancer. Because it's worth it to people to pay a certain insurance premium to be taken are of if something like that happens, and since the cost is spread over many people over a long time it is more or less balanced out. Now there is a whole host of economic problems by making such a third party payer system, including many perverse incentives but that is why you get such debates over the health care system from time to time. Sure the bullet might be cheaper but most people would rather spend a bit more to get the benefits, and the cost for everyone is a lot lower if everybody participates, because otherwise those that are healthier than average would have an incentive to drop out, which drives up the cost for those that remain in the system. Therefore it is arguably economically optimal for everyone to be forced to buy health insurance. there is a lot more detail to it that make the argument more complex but that is the basic equation.
Same deal with pollution controls, sure it has some cost to the business that stops pollution (otherwise they would have stopped already) but the city downriver that needs to spend less to clean up it's water supply benefits. the question with environmental controls is really how much we should all pay to reap maximum reward, and how should this paystructure be organized to give the best results (lowest cost, best incentives for doing better, etc).
Economic optimization makes it so that, for example, the value per capacita is optimized. Forinstance assume you would be willing to pay 5$ for a shirt with a big red X but competition makes it so that you can get the shirt for 1$, you have effectively gained 4$ of value. If you generalize this over the whole economic system you can get significant wealth creation (or destruction, if you set the incentives wrong) without changing the amount of money or stuff in the system, just adjusting the distribution. An example of bad optimization would be if one person owned everything. most of it would have no value because you can't drive a million cars, and everyone else would be in trouble because they own nothing. Such an extreme world can only exist in though experiments but it illustrates how without changing the amount of stuff (cars, butter, etc) or money you can nonetheless alter the value that the society as a whole owns, because having one car has hughe value but the second has less, and the third even less, etc. that is the marginal rate tends to go to zero, and yet the cost in monetary terms stays fixed, but the value doesn't.
We all want entertainment and good artists to be widely distributed, etc, so we give up a variety of rights, such as the ability to make copies or derivative works, to give people a financial incentive to find those people and distribute it so everyone can access it. The artist in turn gives up the privilege of exclusive control of the work in return for money, or whatever other deal they work out with the distributor.
It used to be that printing books was very expensive, however it has gotten much cheaper, and now distribution and sales make up a much larger part of the cost. Distributing it on the internet is even cheaper, which makes the cost of the paywall far more significant, and because of those reasons alone traditional copyright would be under severe threat. Now add in how cheap and easy it is to make copies and old style copyright becomes unenforceable. Add in that many people no longer believe the social contract that supports copyright is a fair deal anymore (why are ebooks as or more expensive than normal books? they should be far cheaper) and the end result is that the system collapses.
The real argument should be about what we are going to do with copyright going forward, because the current system isn't working anymore. A possible solution is to say that we will just devote more resources to enforcement, but who does the enforcing? The rightsholder? that is what is currently in place and even with the excessive sentences and probably illegal blackmail scheme and dirty tricks to save costs it's costing a fortune, and it ruined many peoples lives, and it's unlikely to get much cheaper and it has other costs such as a loss of freedom of speech thanks to overzealous take-down notices. Are we willing to pay that kind of cost? I am not but there are valid arguments to be made for it, just none i could take seriously as real world solutions.
Another solution is to make it a crime and have police looking after it, so do we want to divert resources from rape and murder cases for this or do we want to pay higher taxes?
We can weaken copyright and require registration with a fee and use that fee to fund a group (government or private) who enforce copyrights. This would give a big competitive advantage to big multinationals, and would harm artists, but it is an option.
And so forth there are a lot of ideas on fixing the copyright regime, but it's generally agreed the status quo is untenable going forward. Unfortunately while nothing is free, everybody would like someone else to pay for it.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."