LA Times Runs Boring, Lazy, Unhelpful article on Copyright
Just Whose Idea Is It Anyway?:
...
These days, if you're a Hollywood filmmaker and you shoot a passionate love scene in an art gallery and pan past a sculptural assemblage of tuna cans, you'd better get the permission of the artist, and probably StarKist (sorry, make that StarKist�) as well. Big studios employ whole teams to make sure such accidents don't happen.
Meanwhile, journalists hunger to find derived language in the work of budding novelists. Scandal websites expose lifted phrases in the work of journalists. Computers search pop music for recycled phrases. And people who write little-known books sue when their ideas enter the culture in more popular books.
Also out on the playing field, one now finds anti-copyright activists, who launch legal broadsides, conferences, articles in Wired magazine and open-source software. They worry that, thanks to aggressive lawyers, copyright is being used less and less to encourage creative work and more and more as a means to discourage it. They oppose the unlimited expansion of copyright protection with a freewheeling concept called "copyleft," and they argue for a different kind of intellectual progress, the kind represented by efforts similar to those in my planned book: in essence, the right, even the responsibility to copy.
"… We have to recognize that people who are not powerful should have the right to play with the cultural signs around them," says activist Siva Vaidhyanathan in a published interview. "We shouldn't lock up expressions, symbols and information and assign [them] to corporations and governments without a full and fair examination and justification."
It's an old-fashioned idea. ...
First of all, since when am I an "activist?" I rarely get out from in front of this computer. Not active enought, I would say.
Second, the dude never called me, never wrote to me, never tried to get in touch with me. He just Googled me and quoted stuff from this site. Worse, the only copyright expert he interviewed is Nimmer.
Third, please read the entire article and show me one insight or interesting observation here. It don't understand why the Times would run it.
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