Copyright and Wrong

Cory Doctorow has written a large number of articles on copyright. All of them interesting. He has just published another in the Guardian. Here's the last two paragraphs:

When copyright cartels endanger a new medium, their copyrights should be converted into economic rights or thrown out. This principle is as old as sound recordings: when the sheet-music publishers refused to license their work for records, the state intervened and forced them to sell at a fixed rate. Today, many copyrights are relegated to economic rights: a performer has the right to be compensated for the playback of his CD in a shop, but not to stop the shop from playing the music. Copyright's purpose is to promote participation in culture: where refuseniks subvert that goal, their copyrights should be limited.

This is just a partial list, and it may strike you as radical. But before you dismiss it, consider this: most copyright systems are supposed to work this way in theory. But between corporate bullies who like to assert that "all rights reserved" means that no one is allowed to do anything without permission, and personal theories of what copyright means based on half-remembered lectures from the company lawyer, we treat copyright as absolute. And when we do, we turn a system with a real purpose (providing a framework for participants in creative businesses) into a caricature of itself, one that no one can respect.

Hopefully that tweaks your interest enough to get you to go read the whole article.

I'm 100% behind Doctorow in his fight to give the little guy some space for non-commercial use of copyrighted material as part of the popular culture. To have corporations claim to "own" everything takes the oxygen out of the air and we all are stifled. Cory Doctorow is a voice of reason. Go read his piece.

Here's a Canadian MP, Charlie Angus (NDP member for Timmins-James Bay) pointing out that "secret negotiating" of copyright laws is very, very, very bad: