Controlled Society
Currently we're moving towards more and more controlled society. The copyrights can last as long as 95 years, in case that the copyrights are owned by a corporation. These copyrights also give the owner too large rights for the product. It has never before been the case that we couldn't use the earlier inventions at all without permission of the author (or owner of copyrights). Today, for example, if you now use a landscape from some Disney film in your own animation, or if you merely copy a picture to your website, you can bee in trouble – despite the fact that all the art of classic Disney animations has been inspired and even very closely copied from 16th - 20th century European art, and that Disney hasn't paid a penny to these artists [Allan].
It's not only content and codes that are increasingly controlled. Also the water systems and lands are more and more private controlled. The question isn't whether they're private or government controlled, but whether they're strictly or loosely controlled. The lawful control, so immense today, passes through the state in any case – it is never a phenomenon of the free market, but a one of a state. Nor is the open society about not controlling at all: it's about keeping the control low enough to keep our social sphere open and to allow people use basic means of developing. The problem isn't that there's control. There has been control before, and with good results. Problem is, that the private control these days has got completely out of hands. It is only there to protect private monopolies, which is not what it should be for: control, as all parts of the economic system, exist for facilitating the production and exchange in the society, and thus for facilitating the social life. Currently the control is only making it more difficult.