On August 12 the web magazine Reality Sandwich published a second essay of mine. Click here to read the full thing. Here’s the blurb:
Copyright law now protects creative works for almost a century. At the very least, copyright terms should be drastically reduced. Of course, the concept of revising creative compensation is based on the presumption that we will still use monetary currency with inborn inflation in the future. But a gradual transition would be better than picking up the pieces in a post-apocalyptic world.
Here are the first few paragraphs:
As a long-time supporter of the peer-to-peer torrent network evolution, it became clear by the time I entered grad school in 2007 that there was something very wrong with the implications of copyright law in the United States. I don’t think I fully realized it until I found Creative Commons (“CC” for short) — the innovative service which provides partial copyright protections (sometimes called “copyleft”) to creative authors according to their sharing preferences — and, by extension, the 2004 book Free Culture, written by law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig.
I have been a “pirate” — a file-sharer — since computer programming class in the fall of 1997, when my fellow ninth-graders and I exchanged MP3s over the Internet (using Internet Relay Chat, as was customary in the pre-Napster era) without so much as a momentary consideration of the legal or ethical implications involved. So when Lessig wrote that U.S. copyright law has been drastically over-extended not only in duration but also in application, in such a way that it has a chilling effect on creativity itself, I believed him wholeheartedly.
A part of me was grateful for the multitudes of music to which I had been exposed because of the paradigm shift brought forth by the Internet. Another part of me was giddy over the thought of pop stars, record label hot shots, and their RIAA pit bulls sobbing (and, in the case of the RIAA, hopefully contemplating suicide) in empty mansions because we (by “we,” I mean millions of geographically separated people acting on common sense and a love of music) were dismantling their power pyramid block by block.
You can read the rest at Reality Sandwich!
