Taking Back The Intellectual Property Propaganda
from the a-demonstration dept
Back in May we had a post about Microsoft's propaganda campaign/contest, called "Thought Thieves," where they wanted kids to make films about how "intellectual property theft" harms society. Of course, in the film, you cannot use any third party intellectual property (which would be nearly impossible) and, amusingly, once you submit it, all of the intellectual property you created becomes the possession of Microsoft. The EFF is now letting us know that this contest has inspired a reverse contest, called Thought Thieve$, which is a contest for people to make a film about corporations appropriating "knowledge, culture, and creativity" from elsewhere. While they say the focus is on "big corporations," it doesn't seem like it should be limited to just big corporations. The idea is amusing, but it's really taking the wrong strategy -- blaming companies for misuse of intellectual property, rather than pointing out the overall flaw in the system. That is, a much better idea would be to produce films that show how the free use of intellectual property has helped create incentives for innovation and allowed for amazing new products, services and artwork by building on the inspiration of others to create something even better. Instead of highlighting the negative, why not show how more open sharing of intellectual property can benefit society and the economy -- rather than toeing the line that it can only hurt the economy?
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The last half of this article as an example:
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Re: Improving Techdirt.com
And, I'm not sure where you believe we've been upset about a "failure to credit Techdirt properly." In fact, we've pointed out that the whole credit issue is largely overblown. Plenty of sites do credit us. Some use stories from us without crediting us. It's not a huge deal. If we see an obvious copying, we might send a friendly note suggesting that clearer credit would be nice, but it really doesn't make much of a difference to us.
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Re: Improving Techdirt.com
I was merely making a friendly suggestion that was obviously misguided. Glad you read the comments, but I'll be sure to avoid this site in the future, given it's stated and asserted goals.
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The discussion wasn't about how the site wasn't giving us credit (they actually do give us credit), but how Google's algorithm wasn't working properly and was linking to their copies *instead* of rather than *in addition to* our posts.
but I'll be sure to avoid this site in the future, given it's stated and asserted goals.
Sorry to lose you. I'm confused as to why you're not interested in analysis, but obviously, it's your call.
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