News
My latest Locus column, "Why I Copyfight," was published a couple weeks back while I was on honeymoon and made quite a stir. It's intended as a concise answer to the question, "Why should we care about the copyright wars, anyway?"
The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made.
Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you're not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you've violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement.
There's a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture.
Culture's old. It's older than copyright.
Why I Copyfight
Leave a Reply
|
[...] following little article by Cory Doctorow was published on boingboing today. I guess that by re-publishing it here I am just making Cory’s point: My [...]
[...] Vote Why I Copyfight [...]
So should we take some pressure off the public by not copyrighting so people can share and hence sustain culture?
Or should we enforce copyright everywhere so that the stuff has a monetary value, translating to a valued culture?
Vyaas, culture is valuable regardless of, or maybe in spite of, your ability to charge for it or control it. Are Cory's ideas less valuable because I read them online for free rather than purchasing a paper copy? Are things in the public domain value-less? Fans of 19th Century literature or Beethoven's music would probably disagree.