Once we allow one industry to carve out exemptions and then streamlinine how certain files can be removed from the web, what’s to keep other industries from proposing more categories of information that can be blocked in advance?
All in Corruption
Before you get too excited about Apple’s recent decision to give up DRM on its iTunes music service, be sure to read Apple Shows Us DRM’s True Colors by Richard Esquerra which appeared January 7, 2008 on Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog. Esquerra lists all the remaining uses of “DRM” being made by Apple.
Questions of control and responsibility inevitably arise when strategizing about the role of social media and social networking in the enterprise.
Higher Education Act Reauthorization Requires Colleges to Subsidize Copyright Anti-Piracy Efforts
If you have recently written a check to pay college tuition for the coming semester, you will be interested to know that, if Congress has its way, part of the money you spend on your child’s college education will now be going to subsidize college-based copyright enforcement and anti-piracy efforts.
Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
Back in June of this year when I first learned that Lawrence Lessig had shifted gears I expressed some skepticism about the ultimate success of his decision to focus more on the underlying corrupting influences that are endemic to our legal and political processes.
Carey Lening (a fellow member of the group DC CopyNight) pointed out some news: Lawrence Lessig has announced he is “shifting gears” and moving on to devote his “next ten years” to a different set of issues from those that have consumed him for the past decade.