Copyright and the Internet Precis #4:

Students attending Swarthmore College came across over 15,000 private emails and memo's from Diebold election systems. Unfortunately thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which practically gives private parties a veto power for online content, the students would find themselves unable to publish their findings. Copyright law is starting to seriously effect the Internet and Internet-based publications. In response to this a movement is forming, a movement against the further erosion of our civil liberties and the further distortion of copyright law.
These leftist reformers imagine a world where copyright law gives individual creators the exclusive right to profit from their own intellectual property but only for a short period of time, this gives them incentive to innovate. These people fear a time when simple things we take for granted are going to have a price tag attached to them, a world where something as frivolous as reading text is going to cost 25 cents a line. They theorize that at that point, there is no going back, and they are urgent to prevent it at all costs.
The great worry is that most Americans aren't even aware of the consequences of the decisions being made in the name of fighting piracy. The leftist reformers want to return the the Jeffersonian era of copyright law, a truly free society. A member of this movement, Lawrence Lessig, is the founder of creative commons, which is a sort of weak copyright. It allows creators to exert control over their own creations, but at the same time contributes it to the Internet as raw source material free to copy or modify.
The reformers argue that the Internet has changed the world, television, print and all of the older formats are losing out to a bold new experience in which everyone has a democratic voice in the creation and distribution of content. This is the new world, the old business model is flawed, the recording industry for example, all they do is control distribution, record company execs don't contribute anything. On the flipside you have people who want nothing more than to put a price tag on everything, that 1000 little micro payments is much more democratic than a creative commons license.
A new idea is being brewed by Copy Left and two students at Harvard law school. This idea is that all content online would be registered with a central office. The central office would then tally how often the content is downloaded and compensate the creators on that basis. The money would come from a tax on things like blank cds and recorders. A bold compromise in a heated battle between the entertainment industry and leftist reformers like Copy Left.
I really have to side with the leftist reformers, I feel like the big business of the entertainment industry is nothing more than a scam. Artists and creators manufacture the content, all the execs do is control the distribution and demand a percentage of the profits. Now they are drowning because artists have found a way of controlling distribution themselves, the Internet. Record companies have already begun to fight back against this cultural revolution, but in my honest opinion I hope they never win.