Copyright Is The New Censorship
from the but-stay-optimistic dept
Andy Oram has written a nice article summarizing many of the issues surrounding intellectual property and digital rights management. If you're a regular reader, none of this will be at all surprising to you. At the end of his article, though, he points out reasons to be optimistic on this front (and, thus, comes across as the opposite of Larry Lessig's pessimistic viewpoint). He believes (as do I), that a few things will happen. First, no copy control mechanism will be "perfect", partly because they refuse to use open systems to develop DRM solutions. Thus, it will always be possible to copy stuff for fair use purposes - even if it takes a little extra work. After that, though, he realizes that the "will of the people" can't be stopped on this one. People realize, instinctively, that there's nothing wrong with being able to copy something, and they will fight back against the corporate stranglehold on intellectual property. They will create more open systems that will encourage sharing intellectual property, and the old guard who must protect everything will find that they've lost all their business to companies that understood how to give people what they wanted.
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