The Contrarians, Should copyright be abolished? August 13, 2006
Michael Geist was one of the people interviewed on this cool CBC Radio show, The Contrarians (link to mp3).
from the CBC website
“The Contrarians is a radio show about unpopular ideas that just might be right. Each week, host Jesse Brown invites listeners to step outside of their intellectual comfort zones and try an unorthodox opinion on for size. You may be surprised by what starts making sense.”
Jesse Brown explores problems with current copyright law through examples and insightful interviews. I love the quote below (from time 22:05), but it occurred to me that this wonderful utopian library of the future already exists for millions of people on the surface of this very planet who simply ignore the one sided broken laws that govern our culture and use the Internet in just the way Brown describes.
“So here’s the hype. The Internet becomes the most amazing library ever created. A searchable index that contains every book ever written, every song ever recorded. Every movie, photograph, video, game, painting, and program. Available anywhere to anyone, and like Daren said, we don’t need to abolish copyright to make it happen. We just need to change it. It’s the big idea of our time. But there are people, powerful people who are spending a lot of money trying to stop it from happening.”
Although it exists today and millions of people are enriched by it every day (we call them pirates), the majority of people don’t benefit from this dreamy access to the whole of our knowledge and culture, and they never will. How sad.
I don’t know if abolishing copyright law is the right answer but one thing is certain, what we have in place now does not work for anyone but large corporations in the entertainment industry and politicians looking for campaign contributions from their lobbyists and industry associations. I don’t advocate breaking the law but laws don’t always define what is right or wrong. They do, however, define what you can be sued for.
- Posted in : Copyright Law, Super-Hero, Library, File Sharing, CBC, copyfight
- Author : fairuseday
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