I believe that the UK Government ought to be putting efforts into adapting to the changes wrought by the Internet, adjusting the copyright laws to work with the grain of peer-to-peer file sharing rather than trying to hold back the tide.
This refreshing two-page essay from the 27 June 2009 New Scientist by Peter Eckersley from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, covers a wider range of issues than just copyright. Excerpt:
"Ten years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that
scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe
would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for
free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research,
every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of
digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it,
but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?
This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.
So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism? Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics? The question underlines many things - from music piracy to the woes of the newspaper industry to Google's efforts to scan all the books in the world.
This fragile scarcity has a purpose: to make things expensive. Water is plentiful and essential; diamonds are rare and useless. But diamonds are much more expensive than water because they're much rarer. People in the business of selling information have good reason to want a future where knowledge is valued like diamonds rather than water. Here pharmaceutical giants, Hollywood, Microsoft, even The Wall Street Journal speak with one voice: "Keep expanding copyright and patent laws so our products remain expensive and profitable." And they pay lobbyists worldwide to ensure this message reaches governments."
This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term "intellectual property". As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity.
So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism? Or will capitalism have to evolve into some new kind of digital economics? The question underlines many things - from music piracy to the woes of the newspaper industry to Google's efforts to scan all the books in the world.
This fragile scarcity has a purpose: to make things expensive. Water is plentiful and essential; diamonds are rare and useless. But diamonds are much more expensive than water because they're much rarer. People in the business of selling information have good reason to want a future where knowledge is valued like diamonds rather than water. Here pharmaceutical giants, Hollywood, Microsoft, even The Wall Street Journal speak with one voice: "Keep expanding copyright and patent laws so our products remain expensive and profitable." And they pay lobbyists worldwide to ensure this message reaches governments."
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