The Tyranny of Copyright?

Pinky3 writes "The Sunday New York Times Magazine has a long article entitled The Tyranny of Copyright? Views of both supporters of CopyLeft (Lessig and Zittrain) and Copyright (Ginsberg and Goldstein) are laid out. The article constrasts the cultural commons to the 'permission culture" and covers the unintended consequences of various US laws passed long ago." Dear NYT editors: "Copy Left" really shouldn't have a space in it. Thanks.

Comments

Good to see this in the mainstream press

[jimicus]

The article encapsulates many of the major issues affecting free software today. Best of all, it's written in a reasonably sensible, intelligent fashion (rather than "these copyleft commies are going to take over the world!" which SCO would like us to believe).

Hopefully this indicates that the media is starting to understand that there can be another way. Free software and truly open standards will never become widely adopted while the mainstream view is "how can anything with little or no copyright restrictions be any good?"

Re:Good to see this in the mainstream press

[be-fan]

That's hardly the case. There is a great tradition of people doing things for the benefit of mankind in their freetime. John Locke, for example, didn't really have an occupation as such --- he was a student of the church, but never became a cleric, he studied (and practiced, for awhile) medicine, but never got a medical degree, etc. His main profession seemed to have been being a friend of Lord Shaftesbury, which gave him an influential position and little real work to occupy him, save his writing.

Re:no copyrights... no NYT registration

[ShadeARG]

That's a key point. Without copyrights (rights for the person who created the work to retain it) there would be a serious elitist imbalance of information access. Only trusted individuals would have access to various types of information and some types of information would never be disclosed, or possiblu even recorded. People are human and want recognition for their work and ideas. Copyrights (even to the extreme that they have been taken to today) are the lesser evil in this matter.

Good choice of words

[Space cowboy]

The article uses highly emotive words in the headline, "Tyranny" is almost guaranteed to get more than a casual glance, but the body is pretty factual (although sympathetic to the students, for example). Well written - articles like this are the only way that the rights-restrictions will get wider coverage. It's a good thing to have a free-from-tyranny press :-)

Simon

Confusion

[t_allardyce]

If someone copyrights some of their code, they didnt invent the language (eg c) and they didnt invent many of the functions that the program does (eg printing to the screen) and they certainly didnt invent the compiler or the CPU that the program runs under and they had nothing to do even with the storage medium their program is on (hd/cdrom/paper)! Now i can kind of understand the ownership of ideas eg a method of selecting some information which causes relevent information to be revealed, but even that is based on the idea of "information" and human thought so you cant say thats something original. So what exactly denotes something original? and why should you be able to copyright something thats not original for far longer than is needed to create incentive? (eg 70 years after your death!)

Those who forget history are doomed to...something

[jbn-o]

I appreciate the ideas the article is trying to raise in the public consciousness and I am grateful the NYT is helping to put these issues on the political map. Apparently Boynton agrees with RMS that it's important to "spread understanding of the value of freedom" although Boynton wasn't writing with regard to free software. I hope that in the next articles we can get more into specifics about how these ideas were formed because I think people have an easier time grasping useful abstractions when they are grounded in real-world events.

Giving credit where credit is due is intellectually honest. This article and Mark Webbink's recently praised article both chime in on copyleft or ideas built on copyleft without giving any credit to the person or the organization that brought it to our attention--Richard Stallman and the FSF.

Webbink goes so far as to reinvent copyleft without calling it such, thus confirming how valuable the concept is and what the open source movement is missing out on by rejecting software freedom in favor of practical concerns centered on their chief audience--businesses. The NYT article tells us "Copy Left[sic]" (spelled with a space probably to pigeon-hole the concept on the left side of the left-right false political dichotomy) is a borrowed term:

([...] originally used by software programmers to signal that their product bore fewer than the usual amount of copyright restrictions).

But that would come closer to describing free software. Copyleft is a way to secure the freedoms of free software for a program and its derivative works.

Re:A serious question

[tkrotchko]

I'm not advocating more taxes, but I'm thinking of property tax.

The taxes that you're talking about aren't related to ownership, they're translated to sales or profit/loss.

For instance, most people pay property taxes on a house or land they own.

Some states have car taxes. Others have luxury taxes.

If people really thought there was such a thing as "Intellectual Property", then it would have occured to somebody to tax it.

In fact, I can make a pitch that this tax would benefit society at large. Think of it:

1) IP that is generating revenue would have to be fairly valued ... too low, and the shareholders will revolt, too high, and it gets taxed too much.

2) For IP that is not really worth anything (some old movie that isn't even available), the owner would have to either pay taxes on it, or release it to the public domain.

3) IP owners wouldn't be content to "sit" on something.

Like I said, I'm not advocating taxes, but if we're going to call a copyright, "Intellectual Property", I'm saying we should go all the way and really treat it like property. Taxes and all.