Labour Day thoughts ….
p2pnet news | DRM:- As Canadians celebrate Labour Day, I wanted to remind people about an article Canadian Science fiction author Cory Doctorow wrote titled How Hollywood, Congress, And DRM Are Beating Up The American Economy, and how it’s specifically relevant to this day.
As those in the labour movement mourn the ongoing loss of manufacturing jobs, it’s important for them to realize just what types of policies are at the heart of this change, and Cory does a great job of explaining it.
Short-form:
Many western economies are trying to trade in an economy focused on the production of tangible things for an economy that makes money from licensing intangible knowledge goods.
But this simply can’t work given there are far better methods of production, distribution and funding of knowledge goods than industrial models (and royalty-based licensing), and thus this doomed government policy is continuing to drive western economies into the ground.
To understand some of the larger economic and social justice aspects of this debate, please consider watching one of the recent speeches by Eben Moglen: Software and Community in the Early 21st Century or The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3.
While much of his speech relates only to software, there are other types of human creativity such as medical and scientific knowledge and non-fiction educational material which have similar traits.
Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He's also the CLUE policy coordinator.]
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