Pile of crap

MSN Tech & Gadgets

I am a musician, I have discs out of my music, and there are even artists who've covered my songs. I don't love the idea of file sharing and trading. However, I deeply regret the corporate push that is out there to limit fair use - technologies that limit how many copies you can make of a CD you buy, or restrict your rights to burn a CD of music you've downloaded. These things are often called "digital rights management" - but in fact, they aren't rights at all. The creator of music is NOT entitled by law to restrict the personal usage of home listeners, provided it remains personal usage.

Copyright is a limited granting of rights, entitled to foster creativity. It does not mean the author owns a work in that the same sense that they own property. Artistic creation was meant to eventually become the property of everyone, once the benefit no longer accrued to the original artist and their family. The US Constitution in fact actually outlaws perpetual copyright, a precept that the every-twenty-year Disney extensions break in spirit, if not in actual letter.

Patrick Ross hysterically proclaims that, "No sane business operator enters a contract in which one party has the right to disregard its terms at will, but that's what HR-1201 permits. That hated TPM would disappear from the market, as there's no reason to employ a lock if everyone has a legal right to the key. But as TPM leaves, so do the digital offerings that come with it."

Then tell me - how does he explain GarageBand?

The New York times once wrote about the coming of copyright perpetuity:

Artists naturally deserve to hold a property interest in their work, and so do the corporate owners of copyright. But the public has an equally strong interest in seeing copyright lapse after a time, returning works to the public domain -- the great democratic seedbed of artistic creation -- where they can be used without paying royalties.

In effect, the Supreme Court's decision makes it likely that we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity. Public domain has been a grand experiment, one that should not be allowed to die. The ability to draw freely on the entire creative output of humanity is one of the reasons we live in a time of such fruitful creative ferment.

Similar words could be said about the implosion of fair use.