Copyright law : Killing creativity | The Economist

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  • Copyright law: Killing creativity | The Economist

    IMAGINE that drug companies were so successful at lobbying governments that they won an extension of their patents from 20 years, as they are today, to 100 years; and that the scope of those rights was extended so that future medical discoveries were in effect blocked. The ensuing public outcry would almost certainly result in the law being rewritten in favour of scientific advancement.

    Yet this is actually happening (and with little public scrutiny) in a different area of intellectual property: copyright law. As more and more forms of content go digital, the owners of that content are becoming more possessive and turning increasingly to the law for help. The result is a “permission culture”, argues Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading authority on internet law, where creators increasingly need legal approval for their works, not a “free culture” where creativity is presumptively allowed, as was the case in the past.

    ...

    Instead of adapting to the internet, media companies are using the law to change the very features of the internet that make it so successful. Mr Lessig is no cyber-utopian promoting piracy or an end of copyright. Instead, he argues for a more reasonable balance, by redefining copyright law closer to the function that it served in the past. “A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old,” he writes.

    The author himself is a partisan. Seeing the deficiencies in copyright law, he co-founded an organisation in 2001 called Creative Commons to allow content-creators to license their works in ways that are open rather than restrictive. (Fittingly, “Free Culture” is available free online for non-commercial use under this system; within days of its release, the book was reproduced in numerous formats, including audio recordings.)

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