Cory Doctorow recently published an essay, "Why I Copyfight." His basic point is that sharing knowledge, stories, music, etc. is an essential part of human culture (in this, his arguments echo those of Jonathan Lethem), but that internet technology has made such sharing and copying virtually indistinguishable, and therewith criminalized an ubiquitous and, to a certain degree, essential human behavior. The danger now is, if you enforce the laws, and eliminate copying, then you effectively abolish human culture. (I may be exaggerating the point a little here.)
Reasonable copyright law, he goes on to say, must make a distinction between "good" copying, which is just human, and "bad" copying, which is stealing. Doctorow demonstrates that the former is actually penalized more harshly than the latter by pointing out that the penalties for bootlegging DVDs and hawking them on the street are actually lower than the penalties for making a movie viewable for free on the web.That just doesn't seem right, right?
As writers and designers and otherwise creators of content, do you make this same distinction between copying as just a part of healthy, human cultural exchange and copying as unmitigated rip-off? What about that old truism: Poor artists borrow, great artists steal?
COPYFIGHT is a series of activities about the unstoppable crisis of the contemporary model for intellectual property, and the emergence of free culture. Copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them.
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Aiyna
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