Life in the Network

It sounds to me that the current rules for intellectual ownership take rights away from the original creator as well as anyone who might want to use that work. Obviously, we don't want a system where anyone can just take anyone else's ideas and use them however they want since we'd reach a point where integrity doesn't exist and no one could be sure if all those random ideas out there were original or copied from something else, but it's also not right for ideas to exclusively belong to the people who created them since that takes away creative integrity as well. The system used in the past, copyright vs. public domain, gave people some limited control of how their ideas could be used, but even those two options left no room for specific restrictions. However, it's still better than saying any piece of creative work is the creator's property as soon as they're done creating it. At the very least, people need to be able to include instructions with their work controlling its use without necessarily totally restricting it, which seems to be what Creative Commons is trying to do. Otherwise, the current system puts a lot of pressure on the people compliling the creative works to track down the people who own the rights to those works, and even then, they still might not be able to use those things because of some legal precedence in effect.

In any case, ideas and copyrights are so pervasive in modern culture, especially now that we have the internet, that it's next to impossible to track down every last owner and ask them for permission. It makes sense to have laws protecting people using these ideas in this case. For instance, "the appearance of products bearing well known trademarks in cinema and television is a common phenomenon" (Bound by Law, 49). Laws similar to this should be in effect for other fair use examples, like The Simpsons and the Rocky theme being incidentally captured in other documentaries (Bound by Law, 13, 14). In both these cases, it was corporations who made a big fuss and asked for huge amounts of money in compensation, even going against Matt Groening in the Simpsons example. Worse yet, it ruined the integrity of those documentaries since the filmmakers were only trying to capture reality. Corporations need to understand that the things they own exist in a large context, and they can't go nickel and diming every last appearance of everything. After all, you can't honestly say 4 and a half seconds of The Simpsons caught in the background of some documentary is really going to significantly hurt ratings or DVD sales, can you? These things nees to be judged on a case by case basis.