Lessig - Public Domain Dead in 35 Years

tcd004 writes "Lawrence Lessig, in an article on the Foreign Policy site, predicts that the public domain will die a slow death at the hands of anti-piracy efforts. From the article: 'The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.'"

Comments

Re:Communism must die.

[danila]

First of all, Lenin and Stalin didn't create totalitarian systems and never intended to. There was never an attempt to achieve total (or anything close) control over the population. The level of control was comparable to that in most other countries in that time (consider how liberal, democratic and free America was in 1920s-1930s NOT). The USA had things like HUAC, please never forget about that.

Please don't think even for a second that you understand communism and marxism better than Lenin. This is simply ridiculous. Communists in Russia didn't just make some random decision without consideration for reality. They had like 30 years to think everything over and you assume that they were morons, because they didn't understand what some random Slashdot posters realised in 30 seconds. I don't think so, perhaps you just overestimate your ability to understand complex problems...

I am amazed at how easily you declare that one-party system was unneded. Perhaps it's because you are an overconfident moron, who doesn't know jack shit about Soviet history. You don't know anything about the Soviets in 1920s, you don't know how and why they were created, how they were organised and how they evolved. You don't care about how things are in real world, you only want to be a smartass.

Communism hasn't failed in Soviet Union, unless you use some very special definition of failure. It was a world superpower, the world leader in science, it had world highest levels of education, it provided almost the entire population with products and services to meet their basic needs (food, shelter, health care). It aimed to help each person develop his/her potential without limit and aimed to improve everyone's education and intelligence (the first country ever to do so). It never pandered to our worst instincts, not allowing entertainment to delve into endless violence, sex and bad taste. It opposed racial and nationalist hatred from the very beginning, creating for the first time ever a country with hundreds of nationalities that could coexist in peace and friendship. It supported global peace and provided economic and technological assistance to countries all over the globe (instead of exploting them for cheap labour and natural resources like most developed countries tend to do).

Unless you stick to the official line of Hoover, McCarthy and other vultures, there is no way you can describe Soviet system as failure. Yes, it didn't build a communist society, but it got much further than everyone else even dared to try.

the general public

[XO]

The general public believes that "Public Domain" means "anything that I can copy" .. so, therefore, what does it really matter?

It seems like programmers are the only people who care one bit.