AlexHopmann.com

A shill for the “Copyright Alliance” was given a venue to write on news.com and wrote a piece that could have come right out of the movie “Thank You For Smoking”. Maybe if they do a directors cut of that movie they can add the copyright guy into the back-room along with the smoking, alcohol and gun lobbies.

Copyright is indeed an important thing for our society and as someone who creates intellectual property for a living I rely on it quite a bit. But the take that Patrick Ross takes in his piece deliberately misstates the origin and concept behind copyright (and patents for that matter). Both were created intended as a balanced sets of rights and responsibilities between producers of creative and innovative works and industry. With both copyrights and patents the idea was that the creator would be given exclusive rights to their creation for a limited period of time in exchange for making it publically available and adding it to the body of human knowledge. This was always explicitly balanced by the notion of fair use that these copyrights and patents could not be used abusively.

Now forward in the current era, greedy folks are making land-grabs to increase the value of their intellectual property and lobbyists like this guy are trying to confuse the public about their fair use rights. Copyrights were supposed to expire after the death of the creator, but various entertainment interests (especially Disney) keep pushing Congress to extend their copyrights almost indefinitely. Meanwhile the copyright lobby keeps trying to diminish your traditional rights to purchase a piece of creative work and use it as you would like and protect it with backups by layering on DRM, the DMCA, and hostile legal threats at the beginning of videos and TV programs. Not content to sell you a song for a buck or two, they want to charge you an extra $1-2 for a 30-second excerpt of that thing you already own, but used as a ringtone. They want you to have to buy new copies of all your media every few years as there are new technological shifts and as the CD/DVD media you own wear out.

Lets be clear. There are vibrant and creative entertainment industries and despite the fear-mongering by the copyright lobby, they are not going away. Sure, they are going to have to shift and adapt with new times and new technologies. Some industries that have made money in the past as middle-men might be going away (for example the big record companies and tv networks) as these new technologies reduces the need for their role (and creates new middle-men like Google, Amazon, Apple). But just because a given big record company isn’t healthy does not imply that musicians are somehow going to go away.

Anyway, I’m fairly annoyed with news.com for running this propaganda piece without enough context and wanted to call it what it is.