More great stuff (thanks Walktalker!)

[theknife]

i shamelessly stole this from Walktalker's news post - it's so good, it deserves it's own thread....

[TankGirl]

Yep, theknife, it's an excellent essay and definitely worth a read!

To give an idea what it is about, here are a couple of brief quotes from the story:

If you can set the rules, you can win the contest. That's the major reason the entertainment cartel is winning the debate over copyright in the Digital Age.

Average people are not part of the conversation, not in any way that matters. To the cartel and its chattel in the halls of political power, we are nothing but "consumers" - our sole function is to eat what the movie, music and publishing industries put in front of us, and then send money.

........

The first thing we can do is stop letting the entertainment companies set the terms of the discussion. They torture language and logic. Let's restore some balance.

• One of their most noteworthy achievements, notes Stanford law Professor Lawrence Lessig, is to frame the debate in a way that presents two extreme choices. Unless Hollywood and its allies gain absolute control over digital music, movies and other "content", insist the cartel members, there will be anarchy - a situation in which no creative person can ever be compensated for his or her work.

- tg

[theknife]

This guy does an excellent job of presenting filesharing in the larger context of copyright reform. Very articulate, very well-reasoned.

[multi]

this has been put by a few ppl b4
but this is beutiful.....

When we think about piracy, we should realize who the biggest pirates are -- the members of the entertainment cartel themselves.

The nation's founders wanted to encourage inventiveness. The Constitution explicitly discusses the rights of writers and other creative people in the context of adding to the public good. Congress, the founders wrote, has the obligation and power ``to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries . . .''

Note the order. The purpose is to promote progress in science and the arts. The way we do it is to give creators rights for limited times, after which the material ends up in the public domain -- and, in the meantime, it's available for others to use.

Congress has tortured this clause, extending copyright terms many times. Today the term of copyright is so long as to be effectively unlimited -- or, as well-informed cynics have noted, long enough for Disney to extract every dollar it can get from Mickey Mouse. The irony of the company's founding -- Walt Disney got rich by using material that had fallen into the public domain -- is utterly lost on the current operators who run the conglomerate.

When copyright owners extend the copyright terms of existing works, as they've done repeatedly in the past, they are taking works that would otherwise enter the public domain and keeping them private. That is a theft from the public, from you and me, and it surely amounts to tens of billions of dollars. So who's the real pirate?