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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Joel Spolsky offered the one and only sensible way to fight back that will actually work: go on the offensive and get legislation introduced to roll back the extensions of copyright & other IP laws.

For example: "Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary "to promote the useful arts." Maybe 10 years?"

Not only should these laws be rolled back anyway IMO, but by merely pushing for these you'll drain the resources of the RIAA&co so their offensive campaign stops.

(https://plus.google.com/117114202722218150209/posts/4GgaRiSy...)

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If this is a game of setting the Overton Window then we absolutely have to push back, ideally with Draconian suggestions.

The goal is to make the idea of rolling back copyright duration to 10 years appear to be quite a sensible compromise.

Anyone taking that approach will need to figure out how to counter the "international treaties that can only be modified by unanimous consent require us to have insanely long copyright terms" argument.

Reasonable: A treaty not in the interest of the United States nor of any free society should be abrogated.

Nauseatingly effective: you would take Hollywood bribes to forfeit U.S. sovereignty to those socialist Europeans and thieving Asians?

I could seemingly get behind a much shorter copyright term. However, won't the enforcement measures needed to protect those new works be just as complex, ineffective or invasive as they are for 70 year copyrights? Enforcing copyrighted works, no matter how long or short the period, would require much the same overreaching action, right?

Because many "pirates", especially the more competent ones, are motivated in part by the sheer immorality of the copyright extensions (or so many have claimed here on HN and a few other places I frequent). In many ways, copyright enforcement is in a similar place to the enforcement of Prohibition at the end of the 1920s, where otherwise law-abiding citizens willingly broke what they considered bad law.

The commercial success of DRM-free music on iTunes, Amazon MP3, Magnatune, etc. and DRM-free games in the Humble Bundle would seem to contradict this point.

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