Copyright – a model for a previous era?

I’ve been reading the OpenBusiness blog for a while, trying to get a handle on copyright, which I’ve previously described as being important for our society and our economy. This article, via OpenBusiness, in The Times, is a good start in describing the big issues:

Economists tell us that, as the marginal costs of reproduction shrink, so should unit value. People still want physical books, but the only reason to restrict the digital reproduction of music and film today is to support artists, or — more to the point — to make money. The attempt to use restricted access as a business model in the face of this gigantic change seems not only unethical, but increasingly impractical.
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So we need to examine new models for funding creative works — to address the question of how cultural producers will survive under the new paradigm. New approaches to copyright and reproduction are not just necessary, but inevitable. Copyright — the right of a creator to control the reproduction of a work and to sell this control to others — is a legal device that was designed for an earlier social/technological moment.