> The goal of copyright laws is not to "prevent dissemination of information" but to encourage better intellectual works by granting their creators temporary control of them
We know that copyright systems originate in efforts by the state to prevent publications from being disseminated freely. This is all part of the same political impulse that made private organizations such as volunteer firemen illegal -- if you let people assemble and speak to each other, who knows what might happen.
So you've stumbled into the interesting question "if we create a system to promote goal X, but later decide we can't endorse X and relabel the system as promoting goal Y (without making non-cosmetic changes to the system), what is that system's goal?"
It's like the Ship of Theseus for organizations. It's not really crazy to argue that the goal is still X.
(As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published. But I do think the people saying "the goal of copyright is to prevent certain things from being published" have a reasonable argument that deserves more than just an offhand dismissal.)
> As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published.
There is a fair argument to be made that the companies who induce the government to enact excessive copyright terms do want exactly that, because competition with more public domain works would reduce the margins on works still under copyright (supply and demand).
It also allows those companies to more effectively censor unflattering parts of their own history, e.g. Disney's Song of the South.
We know that copyright systems originate in efforts by the state to prevent publications from being disseminated freely. This is all part of the same political impulse that made private organizations such as volunteer firemen illegal -- if you let people assemble and speak to each other, who knows what might happen.
So you've stumbled into the interesting question "if we create a system to promote goal X, but later decide we can't endorse X and relabel the system as promoting goal Y (without making non-cosmetic changes to the system), what is that system's goal?"
It's like the Ship of Theseus for organizations. It's not really crazy to argue that the goal is still X.
(As to this particular case, I don't believe that the US government is particularly interested in using copyright to prevent stuff from getting published. But I do think the people saying "the goal of copyright is to prevent certain things from being published" have a reasonable argument that deserves more than just an offhand dismissal.)