Wiley Wiggins, of Dazed & Confused fame, digs into Bill Gates’s latest little lie, that the artists and creators who want to make copyright law more reasonable for creators and consumers are, in reality, “modern-day communists” who don’t want to be paid for their work or have any control over it!

This is completely untrue, of course. Copyright reformers recognize that unreasonable copyright laws get ignored, and there is nothing that the creator can do about it. Unless copyright laws are reasonable, they are worthless to the individual creators.

At his “News of the Dead” web site, Wiggins writes:

I’m an artist, I get residual money from DVD sales and cable-casts of my work that is really important in keeping my family afloat. I don’t want people to pirate my movies. But I know that IP extremism and broken media formats are not the way to protect my income. It just doesn’t work. I would make more money if people could legally download and manage their media--mainly because when you give people a bunk deal they will invariably tell you to fuck off and they will steal the media instead, no matter how much you screw it up trying to stop them.

Wiggins gets it exactly right, in my opinion, when he says that unreasonable copyright laws benefit only the media conglomerates that fear innovation. Opposition to copyright reform does not come from creators, because good copyright reform will benefit creators. It comes from businesses that hold the copyrights on the creations of other people. And who want to stop creators from making new things.