Ahh, I think I see the confusion you have. In America, the term "content creator" does not in fact refer to people who create entertaining or informative things (aka content), but to legal entities which have enough money to buy laws, bribe law enforcement to do their bidding, and extort large and small companies into absurd revenue share schemes. It has nothing to do with people actually doing work. The quaint notion of "artist" and "copyright protection" are just abstracte technical terms with clever misnomers, that exist to excite and confuse the masses into supporting this arrangement.
In America? First of all, I'm impressed that you're able to speak on such a grand scale as to paint a very large, very diverse nation with such a simplistic and sarcastic brush.
Second, what exactly was the value in posting that? As a means of making a point, it's obnoxious at best, and useless at worst. Surely there's a better way to contribute to the conversation.
There are many problems with the north american intellectual property systems. The post certainly could have communicated in a far clearer manner though.
I will try in the orignal posters place.
1) Copyright law. It is indefinitely extended. Is this right? It is certainly true that the term "content creator" extends past the point where the actual content creator lived. Ok, so the law says that corporations are people. They own the content! But since they do not die, is copyright truly indefinite?
2) Lobbying in the US. Corporations can "donate" to politicians and essentially buy their positions on copyright and enforcement matters. This is a problem. The government should not be able to be bought.
3) Extortion. A combination of copyright and patent laws, that are perhaps overly broad, allow those with established positions and a lot of money to force innovative newcomers into the systems the incumbents put in place which exists only to funnel money into the incumbents pockets. Small companies do not have the funds to be able to adequately defend copyright or patent infringement cases, regardless of the merit of the claims.
None of these are easy problems, but they are none the less problems.
2) Lobbying in the US. Corporations can "donate" to politicians and essentially buy their positions on copyright and enforcement matters.
I often hear people in the US complain about this, and sometimes make reference to US Supreme Court rulings that allowed companies to donate as much as they want, and these activists want this laws repealed.
You note that political corruption is not unique to the USA right? You know bribery and donations can take many forms even if you remove 'corporate personhood'? Lots of countries have a problem with corrupt politicians.
But American laws are important because America claims jurisdiction over .com, .org, and others. And people who do something that is not a crime in their country but is a crime in America, even if they are not in America and their servers are not in America and their users are not in America can be deported (or face severe actions) in their home country; or can have the US forever closed off as a destination.
The UK has a few problems, but we're remarkably free of corruption. Most of ours is stupid people offering "access" to a government official in return for a donation to a party, or not declaring expenses correctly. Certainly nothing like the transparent buying of influence available in other countries.
Looking at the results of leveson we see a lot of sleazy illegal behaviour from journalists, and we see too-close relationships between politicians and press, but we do not see people paying bundles of cash to influence policy.
And if a newspaper says "Promote this policy and our newspapers will help you win the election" ("it's the sun wot won it"), then that's hardly any different from a big pile of cash.
Of course political corruption is not unique to the USA. Really, we have a much better situation than many parts of the world.
What's different though, is that the US law will often serve as a sort of template or "social proof" when it comes to something like extending copyright. The next step is enshrining it into treaties or law in other nations.
It doesn't make it less of a problem. But it shows how the specific laws in the USA are not the root cause of the problem. Change the culture, don't just overturn Citizens United.
As was shown during prohibition in the US. The challenge isn't changing the culture by legislation, that's easy. The challenge is changing it in a particular desired way.
> hey own the content! But since they do not die, is copyright truly indefinite?
There's actually a fixed statutory period on corporately owned works, given that the life + X years scheme wouldn't work very well there. But yes, they have extended it and can be expected to lobby for further extensions, most likely by trying to convince different countries to leapfrog each other in the terms they offer.
This is pretty much the conclusion and central tenet of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture, and in it you can see the genesis of his next book, Republic, Lost, exploring the corrupting power of money in politics.
> In America? First of all, I'm impressed that you're able to speak on such a grand scale as to paint a very large, very diverse nation with such a simplistic and sarcastic brush.
He's commenting on federal law, which indeed applies to the United States as a whole, or do you claim otherwise?
This actually is reasonable since US is the only country with `america' in its name. Other countries have fancier names that can be used to easily recognize them.
