Friday, February 01, 2008
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Copyright Law Should Distinguish between Commecial and Cultural Uses
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/29/copyright.law
Cory Doctorow's latest is well worth a read.  If you believe that a robust culture requires the 
protection of popular and "folk" expression, though, you may sympathize.

<Karen>

<snip>
This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.

New regime

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.



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