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cory doctorow
Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that
Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steer-
ing wheel.
When the Internet and the PC made it possible to sell a lot
of purely digital “goods” — software, music, movies, and books
delivered as pure digits over the wire, without a physical good
changing hands — the copyright lawyers groped about for a way to
take account of this. It’s in the nature of a computer that it copies
what you put on it. A computer is said to be working, and of high
quality, in direct proportion to the degree to which it swiftly and
accurately copies the information that it is presented with.
The copyright lawyers had a versatile hammer in their toolbox:
the copyright license. These licenses had been presented to cor-
porations for years. Frustratingly (for the lawyers), these corpo-
rate customers had their own counsel, and real bargaining power,
which made it impossible to impose really
interesting
conditions
on them, like limiting the use of a movie such that it couldn’t
be fast-forwarded, or preventing the company from letting more
than one employee review a journal at a time.
Regular customers didn’t have lawyers or negotiating leverage.
They were a natural for licensing regimes. Have a look at the next
click-through “agreement” you’re provided with on purchasing a
piece of software or an electronic book or song. The terms set out
in those agreements are positively Dickensian in their marvelous
idiocy. Sony BMG recently shipped over eight million music CDs
with an “agreement” that bound its purchasers to destroy their
music if they left the country or had a house-fire, and to promise
not to listen to their tunes while at work.
But customers understand property — you bought it, you own
it — and they don’t understand copyright. Practically no one un-
derstands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publish-
ing houses who don’t know the difference between copyright and
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