[p2p-research] Copyright turns 300

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Copyright turns 300 via Boing
Boing by Cory Doctorow on 4/10/10
To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first
modern copyright law, the British Council asked a lot of people with
strong ideas about copyright, from the CEO of Random House to the
founder of Wikipedia, to remark on what copyright is for and how it
might be improved. Here's the short essay I contributed: f there's one
lie more corrosive to creativity above all others, it is the lie of
romantic individual originality. Today, 'copyright curriculum' warns
schoolchildren not to be 'copycats' - to come up with their own
original notions.
We are that which copies. Three or four billion years ago, by some
process that we don't understand, molecules began to copy themselves.
We are the distant descendants of those early copyists - copying is in
our genes. We have a word for things that don't copy: 'dead'.
Walk the streets of Florence and you'll find a 'David' on every corner:
because for half a millennium, Florentine sculptors have learned their
trade by copying (but try to take a picture of 'David' on his plinth
and you'll be tossed out by a security guard who wants to end this
great tradition in order to encourage you to buy a penny postcard).
I learned to write by copying. In 1977, when I was six, my father took
me to 'Star Wars'. I couldn't figure out how a made-up story could be
so exciting, so I went home, stapled some paper together and trimmed it
to book size, and wrote out the story as best I remembered it, doing it
over and over again as I strove to unpick it.
Today, I earn my living by copying: taking ideas that excite me and
combining them in ways that are mine, but never wholly mine.
If copyright law is to truly nurture art and creativity, rather than
merely lining the pockets of the last generation of copyists who now
declare themselves to be pure of all replication and wholly original
from the first word to the last, it *must* recognize and celebrate the
wonderful thing that is copying.




Copyright 1710-2010 "For the encouragement of learning" Previously:
- Happy Public Domain Day!
- Copyright documentary from Australian radio


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