Procrastinator's Weather Report

Saturday, as it happened, a front blew thru, breaking the calm of the past few days. There were widely scattered clouds, but the sky was blue. And the sun was shining and the air was warm.

A good day for a science project, I would say. A good day, considering that it is due too soon.

So the wind may be blowing, and the sun may be shining and the weekend calling, but this day you'll watch the day and the wind and the leaves and the clouds go by from the inside of the window while you make your measurements.

10:30:42 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Copyright/Copywrong

We are well past the turning point at which our cultural and legal notions of property on the one hand and intellectual property on the other are colliding.

In the minds of non-lawyers reading books, listening to music, and surfing the web, copyright is not necessarily a stimulating topic of conversation. But being at the turning point as we are, we need to talk about it. We need to understand it. We need to wrestle with it.

Sadly, however, before the talking and understanding and wrestling has even begun, the conversations have largely stopped. The notion of theft has preempted any fundamental inquiries into the various principles.

It is difficult for non-experts to understand why the concepts of copyright, free-use, intellectual property, and digital rights are not just special cases of physical property, where the notion of theft is so easy to understand.

Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, by Siva Vaidhyanathan, pursues the subject. Here is a snippet from the dust cover

[Copyright/Wrong-comments]: Embedded in conflicts over royalties and infringement are cultural values -- about access, ownership, free speech, race, class, and democracy -- which influence how rights are determined and enforced. Questions of legitimacy -- of what constitutes "intellectual property" or "fair use," and of how to locate a precise moment of cultural creation -- have become enormously complicated in recent years, as advances in technology have exponentially increased the speed of cultural reproduction and dissemination.

I haven't read the book, but I'm headed to the library in a few minutes.

1:21:18 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []