Are you a ‘flaming jackass’?
p2pnet.net News:- “No one wants to believe that the book he’s brought home is only partly his, and subject to the terms of a license set out on the flyleaf. You’d be a flaming jackass if you showed up at a con and insisted that your book may not be read aloud, nor photocopied in part and marked up for a writers’ workshop, nor made the subject of a piece of fan-fiction.”
So says Cory Doctorow in a Locus Magazine article. There’s a lot more, and by way of example, below are a number of tasty excerpts:
The theory is that if the Internet can’t be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right?
Wrong.
The idea that copyright confers the exclusive right to control copying, performance, adaptation, and general use of a creative work is a polite fiction that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history, but which has been laid bare by the Internet, and the disjoint is showing.
And ——>
“At the office, you might get a sweet deal on a coffee machine on the promise that you’ll use a certain brand of coffee, and even sign off on a deal to let the coffee company check in on this from time to time,” he goes on, “But no one does this at home. We instinctively and rightly recoil from the idea that our personal, private dealings in our homes should be subject to oversight from some company from whom we’ve bought something. We bought it. It’s ours. Even when we rent things, like cars, we recoil from the idea that Hertz might track our movements, or stick a camera in the steering wheel.”
And ——>
[...] customers understand property – you bought it, you own it – and they don’t understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don’t know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you’ve ever heard someone say, “You need to defend a copyright or you lose it,” you’ve found one of these people who confuse copyright and trademark; what’s more, this statement isn’t particularly true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that’s wrong).
And ——>
There’s no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they’ve bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they’re abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it’s non-negotiable, anyway?
And ——>
The Securities Exchange Commission doesn’t impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren’t triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you’ll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn’t come between an end-user of a creative work and her property.
And ——>
Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares.
(Does that remind you of anyone?)
And finally ——>
Science fiction is a genre of clear-eyed speculation about the future. It should have no place for wishful thinking about a world where readers willingly put up with the indignity of being treated as “licensees” instead of customers.
Also See:
Locus Magazine – How Copyright Broke, September, 2006
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