Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
There's a big difference between protecting your investments and business content from competitors, and "protecting" it from customers. One of my favorite quotes from Lessig's book, The Public Domain:
Copyright law was never designed to go after individuals, and trying to apply it that way is creating both a chilling effect on creativity and a growing underground that perceives no difference between "Scan a chapter of an out-of-print textbook to email to a friend for research" and "place entire scanned PDFs of new textbooks on BigFileShare.com* for anyone to download"--because the publishers are screaming that those are the same kind of violation.
By not acknowledging the difference between casual sharing (a desirable thing, possibly the foundation of literary culture) and rampant unauthorized distribution, publishers convince a growing number of people that they are clueless about how books are normally used. Worse, by not spending resources prosecuting *actual for-profit violations*--like Amazon's unauthorized sales of 1984, caused by it not paying attention to its own cross-site settings--they convince the public that large publishing & distribution companies are in collusion *against* the people who pay them for content.
This is not a recipe for long-term financial success, in the era of instant global communication and easy data duplication. Attempting to create enforcement laws that evade prosecution requirements, and clickthrough agreements instead of actual license contracts, is not going to create a world in which content is only used they way they'd like it to be used.
*fictitious site name. Find your own file sharing sites. People who can't operate a Google search don't deserve pirated ebooks.**
**Which is not to say that other people do, just that if there are people who "deserve" pirated ebooks, they're not found among those who can't figure out the names of filesharing sites.
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Quite right, Elfwreck. What is so often left unsaid is these discussions, it that copyright was a creation of technology, and technology is killing it.
It didn't exist before the printing press (the first industrial revolution technology) created the ability to make lots of cheap copies.
It wont exist after everybody can make near-free copies of any information.
(With time lags on both ends....)