Wikiliving
Wow, lawyers get really creative. After going through everything throughly, because I was honestly interested, I came up with two things:
1. I am happy this class is "educational" otherwise I do not know how I could possibly defend my current ideas for my upcoming final project (I know, the ideas are protected, but I'm talking about the completed ideas).
2. Could a lawyer sue a lawyer for copyright infringement for infringing on his or her copyright of a previously argued copyright case? I quickly Googled something similar (minus the extra complications) but haven't found anything about a lawyer being sued for mimicking another's argument.
After I made it through all the material, things are little clearer. I had always wondered how documentaries and shows like the Colbert Report got away with what they did. While I am opposed to the current laws that seem to revolve around Disney extensions of historical story tales, it is great to see that we still live in a nation where we can be satirical and criticize.
Personally I feel intellectual property is anything that can be used to create more knowledge. As Barlow explains:
Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum (which, in fact, rather resembles what is being attempted here).
Whatever your definition of intellectual property is, it is wrong if used for the digital world. In the past, copying a quality picture literally meant finding the original or negative, and making a copy using photography equipment. This process was both time consuming, and the product was closer to the author. Now that we have digital video, pictures, and sound (along with text, graphics, etc.) it can take seconds for this media to get half way around the world and back again, with the author possibly never knowing it was taken.
I had heard a few excerpts about Creative Commons before, but their idea helps create more intellectual property. OpenSource software has been one of the great successes in the technology sector, serving as a public participant in many markets competing against the best of the web-browsers, email organizers and document creators, and doing very well. Mozilla is a great example of this, and I currently use it's web browser Firefox.
What is interesting to me is this concept of what kind of developments societies go through. In agrarian societies everyone worked together to help each other out so much as possible. It was the perfect kind of communism if done right, where everyone did their own work to contribute to the community. Then the American Industrial Revolution came around, we had to create the New Deal to reset our structure for helping our citizens. People seemed to distance themselves from each other (every man for himself), and we ended up with people suing each other for borrowing or even at times improving on what they did. While these protections are needed for the creators of works, it would not have happened in the agrarian societies. Then the digital world came, and now we have cross-cultural merging and re-creation of programs as they mature. We are now dealing with this cross culture of people trying to help each other, but fighting against the government, the system, the "man".
What I'm getting at is that I think Lessig hits it dead on. OpenSource is great, but filled with a bunch of "political slugs". We live in a world of extremes, and I think we can see this in this digitally-collaborative world. Those that are politically involved, generally spend too much time on policy and do not have enough of the best ideas. Many of the people that have great ideas, don't spend any time to talk to people about it.
I am looking forward to these next few weeks. Looking at the court cases near the end of "Bound By Law?" makes me glad I'm having a class on this now, and not learning about it through a lawsuit.