Slashdot Mirror
Tennessee's Super-DMCA Rises From The Grave
Tsar writes "Members of the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network turned out in force as Tennessee's Super-DMCA Bill, its hour come round at last, slouched back to Nashville's Legislative Plaza. The industry heavyweights made their pitches, but were thwarted by thoughtful, intelligent comments and questions from the newly-formed Joint Committee on Communications Security. My favorite quote of the day: 'I stand here before you as representing the MPAA, one of the leading advocates of First Amendment rights...' I think I blacked out for a minute after that."
If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
I'm not Seth.
Jefferson certainly knew about the writings of the Denis Diderot and the Marquis de Condorcet. Diderot was commissioned in 1763 by the Paris Book Guild to argue for a copyright equivalent to physical property; he went so far as to claim that works of authorship were in fact a truer form of property, as they were entirely the product of their creator, while physical property could be formed only from natural resources and the work of other men. Condorcet held that ideas originated in nature and, unlike real property, could be cultivated by all without diminishment; on the contrary, he wrote, the dissemination of ideas benefitted the common good. Diderot portrayed the artist as a creator; Condorcet saw a discoverer. Diderot perceived ideas to exist for the benefit of one man, Condorcet wished them to enrich every man.
Had the framers intended a Diderotian system, they would have implemented one. Instead, the American institution of copyright was informed by Condorcet and Locke. But if you want to speculate about Jefferson's mind, why not ask the man himself?
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. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.... -Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Isaac McPherson, 1813