Top
Browse > Home / Tech / Selling us our culture — that’s what they’re doing.

Selling us our culture — that’s what they’re doing.

February 9, 2007

In the Harper’s feature “The Ecstasy of Influence“, novelist Jonathan Lethem writes a fascinating and impassioned essay on how essentially all artistic creation involves quotation — overtly or subtly, consciously or unconsciously, and that we continue down the path of ever-increasing intellectual property restriction only at the risk of killing the very culture that is ostensibly being saved.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

No matter how you feel about copyright, public domain, rights management and related matters, you owe it to yourself to take a couple of minutes and read this short but rewarding article.

Like this article? Share it!
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon

Written by Chuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
Tags:

Comments

Got something to say? [privacy policy]





Possibly Related


Selling is sellingConversion Chronicles has a nice little write-up on writing sales copy for your web site. Their take is that when it comes right down to it, all successful methods are essentially the same method. Check out the article here for some good common sense guidelines for writing your sales copy. "I don’t subscribe to all the thousands of new and fangled ideas to sell anything. This article describes two methods described by many as 'new'’ online sales techniques, which many people call the long copy versus the short copy debate. It’s actually simply a mix of the ways we’ve all been selling stuff since print was invented."...


Coffee Culture in the USAIt wasn't until I moved to the US that I started drinking coffee regularly and became what they call in the Netherlands a 'koffieleut', which translates literally into ‘coffee socialite.’ Although the average European drinks more coffee per year than the average American, the cultural importance and its effects on the average European seems to me smaller than that on the average American. After all, coffee is a cultural obsession in the United States. (by: Remko de Knikker) Chains with thousands of branches like Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks dominate US daily street life. Especially in the morning (90% of coffee consumed in the US is in the morning), millions of white foamy cups with boldly imprinted pink and orange logos...


Ultimate XP AutomationIn a related note, MSFN has a tutorial on how to build an Unattended Windows Install CD. You can preload it with all of your information, push a button, walk away, and come back and have Windows installed—even with your applications and customizations. Is this the next step in anti-malware tools?  Just pull the flush handle and let Window’s bowl get emptied and refilled? Actually, all this REALLY needs is two more steps—one to plug itself into the net and get itself hopelessly corrupted again, and another to get frustrated with it and press the reinstall button. If I could get that, I could just unplug the monitor, slide in the CD, and watch it cycle while I use my...


Hollywood Lawyers Illiterate?Ah. Suddenly it all becomes clear -- apparently entertainment industry lawyers just can't read. Reuters has picked up a Billboard article with a quote from a "founding member of the International Association of Entertainment Lawyers" which essentially paints Creative Commons as a "serious threat to the entertainment industry." It then goes off on some extremely bizarre tangents which manage to completly miss the point of Creative Commons. Fortunately, Lawrence Lessig has gently and calmly delivered them a detailed fisking in the way only he can. The hyperbole from Mr. Sukin -- a lawyer -- was funny. But what struck me in the article was the assertion by Butler that "Creative Commons urges creators to give up their copyright protection" in...


iTunes EnhancementsiPodlounge has been working overtime at their whiteboards, and they've came up with a list of ten excellent suggestions for improvements in the next version of iTunes. But all is not perfect in the world of iTunes; while most users are delighted with iTunes’ feature set, some believe that iTunes is lacking certain newly essential functions. Steve Jobs has already demonstrated podcasting support, which will be included in the next version of iTunes, but what else does the program need? In cooperation with our readers, we’ve looked closely at what’s missing in iTunes 4, so here are ten ideas for new features in iTunes 5. A couple of these are "who-cares" items for me, but some of them (such as...

Bottom