What you get when my brain crashes…

The DMCA In the Real World

I found this over at Miscellanea:

Sad, but true. Think about THAT the next time someone start spouting nonsense about “needing more protection for copyright holders.”

Free Culture

I just stumbled across a book called Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. It’s about copyright - but also about a lot more than just copyright. It’s a freely available e-book (gotta love Creative Commons licensing), so please do  download the book and give it a read - I highly recommend it.

You may just change your mind about copyright after reading this book - and that’s a good thing.

On Copyrights, Patents, and the Constitution

Techdirt: On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents:

This short series of posts starts out really well - by quoting (of all people) Thomas Jefferson:

“Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

The implication of course being that the founders did see the problems with giving exclusive control (ownership) of ideas to people (or companies) willy-nilly, and the need for balance.

A really good examination of the subject, and well worth the read, IMHO.