The 1709 blog and IPKat copyright debate has concluded. Summaries by James Firth and Emma Beverland & Sam Bardon are pretty fair.

However, I am amused by Copyhype’s Terry Hart who concludes “It appears that Team Copyright won”

Here follows my response to Terry:

He he! =))

Remind me what the contest was again?

It was a debate. At the conclusion many fence-sitters had been swayed toward ‘praising’ copyright.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Copyright abolition is pretty scary [to those reliant upon it], and publishing corporations’ offers of help and support to poor struggling artists sure sound nice.

What equivalent proportion of the 18 million french pirates do you think were represented in the audience at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer (2nd largest law firm in the world)?

Those interested in copyright tend to be about 100:1 for it vs against it in my experience.

It’s not the ‘abstainers->praisers’ that copyright supporters should congratulate themselves for (they’re easy), but ‘buriers->praisers’ and preventing any ‘abstainers->buriers’. Note that the audience was not asked a show of hands of those who had swung from ‘abstention/praise->bury’.

That more people learn to support copyright every day can mask the increasing numbers of former supporters who become disillusioned.

So, Terry, do you want to hype and praise copyright, or do you want to understand its injustice and the reasons for its inexorable demise?