An interesting article on the O'Reilly Radar talks about an idea LawrenceLessig mentioned: Copyright protection should be short, and renewing it should cost a tiny bit of money. As the author points out, the current YouTube situation is a bit similar: As long as YouTube doesn’t have tons of money, you can’t make money sueing them. Therefore, enforcing your copyright on that site has a tiny non-zero cost: Searching the site and writing all the emails asking them to take down protected material.
I like it. 😄
Sounds a bit like passive resistance to me. And I think that’s what we should be doing. I don’t think we all need to break the law to show our displeasure, but making it harder and harder for them to run business their way, ripping us off and sueing us – that’s the way to go.
I guess that’s why I support the development of decentralized and anonymous PeerToPeer filesharing protocols and networks. Not because I want to use them to get at all the wonderful music, movies and books out there, but because I want to make it more difficult for them to prove their point. Don’t buy their CDs to deprive them of their income, force them to hire expensive specialists and lawyers, lead them on to false trails and into dead ends, wasting their money. Until the competitors who get it drive them from the market.
Notice how I carefully avoided defining who “they” are. Not all publishers are evil, not all copyright is bad, and collecting societies are not necessarily corrupt. But many are. ;)
#Copyright