The End of Innovation?

Simone writes: "2001 has been a bad year not just for dot-coms but also for people interested in preserving the public's right to fair use of copyright materials. From the shutdown of Napster and the DeCSS case to the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, federal prosecutors and U.S. courts have acted in support of copyright interests and against the public's ability to use technology to secure fair-use rights. OpenP2P.com editor Richard Koman talks about these turns of events with Lawrence Lessig." Not particularly coincidentally, Lessig has a new book coming out on this very topic.

Comments

Some people WANT their stuff downloaded...

[Gregoyle]

The Offspring tried to release their entire new album (I forget the title) on their website. For free. What happened? Their record company shut them down. Thousands of artists release their material online, for example: mp3.com, besonic.com, djcentral.com, and countless others. Dave Matthews Band encourages trading of bootlegs of their concerts online. Many smaller record companies (not affiliated with the RIAA) also like the exposure they get by having their work available for download online, and encourage it.

When they shut Napster down, you couldn't trade your recordings of Dave Matthews concerts unless the files were named undescriptively (read: uselessly). Many smaller artists were/are finding that their music is NO LONGER available for download over Napster. This is exposure they *depend* on.

Not all copyright holders are the RIAA. I've said this before and so have many others, but I will say it again. The RIAA represent themselves, and their own bottom line. They do not represent the artists. They think they represent all of music, when in reality they are crushing the "little guy" who is so important to musical innovation (eek, I actually used that word?!?) to preserve the status quo.

WTF?

[Ender Ryan]

"which has never really struck me as being an integral part of innovation..."

Almost all technology in use today is in part available because of reverse engineering.

Without reverse engineering there would be no interoperability between Windows, Macs, Unix, etc.

Without reverse engineering we wouldn't even have the current PC at all.

Without reverse engineering we wouldn't have the huge microwave oven market we have today.

Car manufacturers buy each other's cars and completely take them apart to see how competitors do things.

There is simply no end to how much technology is improved through reverse engineering. Reverse engineering has ALWAYS been a huge part of innovation.