[leepowers]

Sharing freely and embracing open source has been an unalloyed good for encouraging the development of software; so there is some insight to your comment. But participation in open source is voluntary. And right now any artist or musician can make the voluntary and free decision release their work under a Creative Commons license. It would be a degradation of individual liberty to require all workers in all creative fields to open source their work. That's not a choice you, or me, or the government should get to make on behalf of another person.

One might argue that some regime of publicly funded remuneration could be just compensation for the public seizure of all creative output. But that's orthogonal to the point. The seizure itself is the problem.

[tomc1985]

My issue is more that an individual work can't stand alone, in a legal sense. There is always the work, and then there is a an artificially-imposed, invisible framework around it that prohibits the free use of the work it supposedly protects.

I wouldn't describe it as public "seizure", more the omission of that previously-mentioned framework which in-turn allows the work itself to be free of encumbrance.

Does a U.S. government worker creating something public domain experience a "seizure" of his work? I don't think so. And in fact the government functions quite well with this rule in-place. Why can't we consider extending that to the private sector as well?

There is the old adage of, "information wants to be free". In a way, so does everything else.

But particularly in the digital domain -- which economically can be described as a land of plenty, where information can be freely copied, transformed, and executed with little-to-no-cost -- we should embrace this new economy rather than trying to force physical-world constraints where they don't belong.