Jonathan Zittrain On The Spiderweb of Copyright Law

Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, takes an unusual approach to critiquing copyright in this Legal Affairs article. He explains with an analogy to the bizarre patchwork of United States tax codes a reason that (in the words of one of Zittrain's colleagues) "all the cyberprofs hate copyright." It goes beyond simple indignation that current copyright laws often grant seemingly unfair monopoly powers, and into the tangled minutia of the laws themselves.

Comments

For those of you who can't read...

[__aagmrb7289]

Seems like most early posters didn't really read the article. Okay, a summation:

1. Copyright law was never meant to apply to the individual
2. It does now
3. It is way too specific in some areas, but not specific enough in others.
4. It often stifles creativity, but when used correctly, it encourages it.
5. Copyright law is NOT BAD, just our implementation of it.

so... conclusion:

Add some sort of "fee" to our taxes (maybe just on ISPs, more like on everyone) that allows us, as individuals, to use any copyrighted material we want, as long as we don't try to sell it, without robbing the owners of the copyright - cause we are paying them.

I like it...

By the way... read the damn article before posting. /. ain't for the ignorant, so stop letting yourself be excluded (aka ignored)!

Re:A new peer to peer model ??

[wfberg]

Now of course, I'm not suggesting that y'all start firing up windows, but I find this point really intriguing - filesharing using the SMB protocol over port 139 a'la redmond. What (c|w)ould the RIAA do about that ?

Has been done. A company called scour.com used to use SMB. It got sued by the MPAA and RIAA and NMPA and subsequently went bankrupt.