Abolish copyright.
You can charge for material things - paper, ink, packaging material, the time of the workers to prepare it. You can even charge for bandwidth, server upkeep, and electricity. But information has no material cost and therefore cannot be sold.
Exercise civil disobedience: it's your obligiation as a good citizen to be a pirate. We can negotiate again when they change the law to make copyrighted works enter the public domain within our lifetimes.
@sir What terms would you be willing to agree to in the negotiation?
@realcaseyrollins I would be open to discussing a middle ground where copyrighted information enters the public domain before it becomes obsolete (5-10 years?), let alone before anyone who ever saw it in its original form is dead. It would be necessary to defend fair use even inside of that time period, and to roll back some obnoxious interpretations of copyright which lead to things like mashups or even the opening beats to "Ice Ice Baby" being cause for suit. I would also demand the abolishment of DRM.
@sir This is interesting! I find it interesting that you would argue for copyright protections only * after * a certain amount of time, not before; this is a fascinating concept.
I hate DRM. But I would argue for time-based DRM in this scenario, so the limitations are imposed after it's out of the public domain.
@realcaseyrollins oh, I see the confusion.
>copyrighted information enters the public domain before it becomes obsolete (5-10 years?)
Better phrased as: copyrighted information enters the public domain such that the time when it enters the public domain is prior to the obsolecense of that information
@realcaseyrollins not yet, except maybe some of the older ones.
@realcaseyrollins aye, and for sure its source material
@realcaseyrollins sorry, I don't think you understood me. I'm basically arguing for a return to the original intent of copyright here.