People have always copied things. In the past, most items of value were physical objects. Patent law and economies of scale meant that small scale copying of physical objects was usually uneconomic, and large-scale copying (if it infringed) was stoppable using policemen and courts.
P. Biddle et al.
However, the popularisation of Internet and digital media removed those boundaries. We live now in copy and paste world. Internet became synonymous of ‘no rights reserved’. 1000s of files are shared every day. Music and movie industries were affected the most by this phenomenon. But with the growing popularisation of Web 2.0 everyone is affected now. The piracy is no longer affecting giant industry moguls but all internet participants like me and you. Some of us, don’t care about copyrights, whether their creation is modified or copied some would like to be credited and some would like to have some sort of royalties paid. We have to be aware that nothing is entirely free. As Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman said: "There is no such thing as a free lunch." We can refer this quote to the copyrights as well. Someone had to spend an x amount of time and resources to create a blog entry, take a picture or write a computer program. These authors may not seek always financial advantages; nevertheless their work should be protected against unlawful use.
The Creative Commons licence fills the gap between ‘All Rights Reserved’ and ‘No Rights Reserved’ concepts. It allows authors to state under what conditions and in what way their work may be used.. We should be all aware of the risk and boundaries of living in today’s information society but the copyright law ought to promote and foster creativity rather than strangling it.
Sources:
Copyright Infringement - The Dark Side of Web 2.0
P.Biddle, P. England, M. Peinado, and B. Willman, The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution
L. Lessig, Free Culture
No comments:
Post a Comment