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The "Copyright Black Hole" Swallowing Our Culture
An anonymous reader writes "James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School, has a piece in the Financial Times in which he argues that a 'copyright black hole is swallowing our culture.' He explains some of the issues surrounding Google Books, and makes the point that these issues wouldn't exist if we had a sane copyright law. Relatedly, in recent statements to the still-skeptical European Commission, Google has defended their book database by saying that it helps to make the Internet democratic. Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
All of them? Seriously, in this day and age it is embarrassing we have not leveraged the power of the Internet to empower people to not only vote, and proclaim viewpoints but to be part of the legislative process itself. I would wager most people on this site know more about copyright than the average congress critter.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
It's not "swallowing" our culture as much as fencing it off from all sorts of people.
I'm convinced, though, that the more corporations try to limit the availability of "culture" by trying to create a false scarcity, the level of productivity among local and online artists who refuse to participate will increase, and more people will turn to them for their art, music, literature, journalism, etc.
The only way to save our culture is to change the dynamic that exists between corporations and individuals. You might be surprised to learn that corporations did not always exist just to enslave the population. And I believe it will not always remain so.
My fear though is that they will try to close those "loopholes" by making it harder for individuals to distribute their own music without a "license". There could also be technical limitations placed, such as making the popular media players only play "licensed" media. I could definitely see a company like Apple or Sony making their players only play files that come from the big corporate copyright holders. Hell, that's been their plan for a long time, but the homebrew and hacker communities kept defeating them. I don't believe they're ready to give up on the "gated community" view of culture, though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I made a really long-winded comment about it previously.
To store 720p AND 1080p copies of every movie and tv-show listed on IMDB would probably take something like 10 PB. That would likely cover dubbed soundtracks and subtitles as well.
And at Sun's prices, that'd be about 10 million dollars for a single copy (not including data center costs) stored in 21 racks.
Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.
Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.
Wow, copyright law really is a Black Hole!
No. There's another reason why English in the lingua franca of the Internet. A major feature of the English language is its ability to incorporate foreign words and phrases in a useful way which colors, expands, and even conceptually improves the language. For example, this sentence is perfectly sensible English.
Hey amigo, konichiwa! That was some serious schadenfreude Bob showed earlier when Kate's car broke down, n'est-ce pas?
In this sentence, I used words from a total of five languages: English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish. It doesn't matter that two were Romance languages. I could have used "chombatta" instead of "amigo" and gone completely neo-African cyberpunk. Hell, if I spoke Klingon, I could have added some of that in. The German word, "Schadenfreude" adds a new word to English which explains a concept that doesn't exist in the language already. Notice also, that I could use the Saxon genitive to expression possession instead of the less efficient "the car of Kate".
The result is that English can expand really fast. It's likely the most extensible and expansive language on earth. It is always easily expressible without reliance on numerous accent marks. Japanese requires more effort to express electronically. Japanese also isn't as extensible in written form as English is. Japanese is written using multiple forms: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and romaji. The Japanese pull it off well, but these are hacks - especially romaji. The Chinese have the same problem.
English can grow to accommodate words from other cultures as they become trendy. If Brazil becomes an amazingly cool place culturally, and people outside Brazil start using Brazilian slang, English will better adapt to include Portuguese words than say German or Russian. If I were to bet on any language surviving another couple thousand years and still being structurally the same while still growing, I think it will be English. Sure, we probably not recognize it cause the first person singular pronoun will be "Wa" instead of "I", but a language like Chinese can only maintain its native structure by resisting multi-cultural extension.