Slashdot Mirror
We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle has a blog post comparing the recording industry's arguments in 1909 to those of 2009, with some lovely Google book links to the originals. Favorite quote: 'Many and numerous classes of public benefactors continue ceaselessly to pour forth their flood of useful ideas, adding to the common stock of knowledge. No one regards it as immoral or unethical to use these ideas and their authors do not suffer themselves to be paraded by sordid interests before legislative committees uttering bombastic speeches about their rights and representing themselves as the objects of "theft" and "piracy."' Industry flaks were more impressive 100 years ago. In that debate the recording industry was the upstart, battling the entrenched power of the publishers of musical scores. Also check out the cameo appearance by John Philip Sousa, comparing sound recordings to slavery. Ironically, among the subjects mentioned as clearly not the subject of property rights were business methods and seed varieties." Boyle concludes: "...one looks back at these transcripts and compares them to today's hearings — with vacuous rantings from celebrities and the bloviation of bad economics and worse legal theory from one industry representative after another — it is hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia. In 1900, it appears, we were better at understanding that copyright was a law that regulated technology, a law with constitutional restraints, that property rights were not absolute and that the public would not automatically be served by extending rights out to infinity."
Anti-copyright pundit writes a rhetorically extremely laden post denunciating modern copyright. Demands that human rights be recognised and property rights be limited. Further news at 5.
Most people didn't have a phone and thus couldn't call emergency services. Many had no electricity. There was no cure for polio. Cancer was an absolute death sentance. Blacks rode the back of the bus and got lynched. Women couldn't vote.
In other words, let's not use nostalgia as a tool to advance reform.
Such a tactic would fit in all too well with the paleoconservative and populist movement that's threatening to give "new" direction to the Republican party. That movement already advocates a laissez-faire attitude towards certain things, based on the idea that it's "the way things were meant to be". They conveniently leave out that returning to the hands-off approach is objectively anti-labor and racist.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Because clearly, the position of the US over the last 160 years in development of research, technology and mass-media products that all are protected by copyright and patents have been lagging every other country in the world with more developed communal patent systems. Or not.
The prediction was made that copyright would stifle innovation and damage the country.
To point out in an ironic way that the US has still done better than most other countries while having these laws in place, is not a troll. Marking it a troll is idiotic.
One more nail in the coffin of the idiocy and retardedness of Slashdot (this may be called a 'flamebait', but is honestly meant).
That's because you're a moron who wants to think he's a martyr.