Believing in Copyright and a Public Commons. Dumping on Creative Commons, Arnold Kling (or a headline writer at Tech Central Station has posted an interesting essay called... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Dan Gillmor:

I'd like to address the following statement from Kling's essay:

The Commons enthusiasts believe that content publishers earn their profits by using copyright law to steal content from its creators and charge extortionary prices to consumers.

No, that's not what I believe, though it does happen on occasion.

What I do believe includes the following:

Copyright is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Copyright has been abused by the copyright industry in a number of ways including endless extension of terms and relentlessly aggressive political pushes to restrict fair use and other rights of customers.

The copyright cartel has stolen from the public domain -- from all of us.

Some balance is needed.

12:19:48 AM    

Tom Matrullo:

but seriously.

I was going to blog the bit below about Seyla Benhabib's essay, Taking Ideas Seriously, anyway, but it seems even more pertinent in view of some reax to what I wrote the other day about wooly blogging vs. media.

Dave Rogers and Tom Shugart weighed in appreciatively, and AKMA has clinched the award, if one is ever bestowed, for "Best blog headline containing the term 'Matrullo'." [update: Steve Himmer too - more on his very suggestive line of thought anon]

AKMA also pointed to a set of citations from Jonathan Delacour connected by the theme of historical ignorance. The piece by Joan Didion speaks for what many have less eloquently felt.

Delacour expands on the notion of historical ignorance in a later post, briefly but pointedly marking both ends of the riddle at the heart of originality and much else, namely, the duel between the power of alleged classical authority on one hand vs. the potential solipsism of the individual (and the new) on the other:

is it not also possible that we are writing ourselves into an existence of which only we are aware?

He goes on to suggest big questions that should be the subtext of just about any lecture touching upon valued works of the past:

What to do? In immersing oneself in the past do you not run the risk of disengage from the present? What happens when the old turns out to be infinitely more fascinating than the new?

I would suggest that such questions not only should be latent in the dialogue of reading the past, but in fact always are there. It takes a mighty effort on the part of teachers and students to ignore them, as happens every day.

And it's here that the Benhabib essay takes on an added value for me, addressing as it does the matter of a teacher who happens to be a philosopher (Heidegger), and his students, as this relationship has been examined in two recent books by Mark Lilla and Richard Wolin.

In the process of dismantling both books, Benhabib seems to me to offer a fine instance of how the relationship of the general to the individual in history might usefully be approached.

So, as I was going to blog:

The austere Seyla Benhabib kicks some serious ass in this essay in the Boston Review - a simultaneous meditation upon Ricoeur's suspicious hermeneutics, the legacy of Heidegger, the relationship of philosophy to political and biographical choices, Jewish nationhood, and the problem of failing to read closely those writers who problematize all of the above in their work. She rocks.

...we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein?s homosexuality, A. J. Ayer?s promiscuity, Foucault?s ?sadomasochistic? experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey?s sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt?s affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.

( - thanks to wood s lot for pointing to the Benhabib essay)

Your thoughts welcome.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]
12:13:39 AM