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Saved by 8 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2008-01-29


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In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other kids.

Highlighted by lampertina

on 2008-01-29 by lampertina

- key phrase: "in theory" (how true)

Then came the internet, which introduced two critical changes: it made it easier for folk-users of copyright to find each other and spread their creations and copies farther than ever, and it made it easier for enforcers to find them and threaten them, especially once tools like the "notice and takedown" regime in the European Union Copyright Directive and the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act came on the scene.

Highlighted by clairefontaine

Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.

They are also acting as though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the church basement.

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.

Highlighted by lampertina

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

Highlighted by lampertina

on 2008-01-29 by lampertina

- right on!

A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.

Highlighted by lampertina

on 2008-01-29 by lampertina

See: http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/node and: http://www.wipo.int/portal/index.html.en