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The Copyright Cuffs, by Jonathan Zittrain
"...For all of its detail, however, Title 17 remains
stubbornly vague, recalling Woody Allen's indictment of
a bad restaurant: "The food at this place is really
terrible...and such small portions."
...Those who spend careers mastering today's copyright law
have become lost in its detail. Using the obscure vernacular of specialists,
they keep arranging and rearranging the sticks in the bundle of rights found
with Title 17, building ungainly legal Tinkertoys and then calling upon the
public to be able to follow each spoke and hub.
...A formal report by a commission chartered by the
British Patent and Trademark Office suggests, without a trace of
self-consciousness, that we encourage schoolchildren to include the copyright
symbol on all their homework. The Business Software Alliance, a commercial
software industry group, just unveiled a website for kids to inculcate the
values of Title 17 over those of consumer praxis.
...These attempts to lawyerify our culture won't
work. We hew to laws against stealing because there is already
cultural consensus that stealing is wrong, rooted in the fact that the thief
deprives the good citizen of the stolen property. To copy an idea does no such
thing; wrote Jefferson, "he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
darkening me."
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