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cory doctorow
Which isn’t to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illumi-
nate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie
Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians
that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is,
when all you’ve got is monks, every book takes on the character
of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the
books that are better suited to movable type migrate into that
new form. What’s left behind are those items that are best suited
to the old production scheme: the plays that
need
to be plays, the
books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between
covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and expe-
rienced in a throng of humanity.
Increased democratic-ness translates into decreased control:
it’s a lot harder to control who can copy a book once there’s a
photocopier on every corner than it is when you need a monas-
tery and several years to copy a Bible. And that decreased control
demands a new copyright regime that rebalances the rights of
creators with their audiences.
For example, when the VCR was invented, the courts affirmed
a new copyright exemption for time-shifting; when the radio was
invented, the Congress granted an anti-trust exemption to the
record labels in order to secure a blanket license; when cable TV
was invented, the government just ordered the broadcasters to
sell the cable-operators access to programming at a fixed rate.
Copyright is perennially out of date, because its latest rev was
generated in response to the last generation of technology. The
temptation to treat copyright as though it came down off the
mountain on two stone tablets (or worse, as “just like” real prop-
erty) is deeply flawed, since, by definition, current copyright only
considers the last generation of tech.
So, are bookwarez in violation of copyright law? Duh. Is this
the end of the world?
Duh
. If the Catholic church can survive the
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