What modern copyright law means to our culture

What does it mean to our cul­ture that we have imposed the most dra­con­ian restric­tions on the reuse of intel­lec­tual cre­ations than at any other time?

1. We are the first gen­er­a­tion to deny our own cul­ture to ourselves.

2. No work cre­ated dur­ing your life­time will, with­out con­scious action by its cre­ator, become avail­able for you to build upon.

via The Public Domain in 2 Twitter sized bits.. | The Public Domain.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt adds to this:

For peo­ple who don’t rec­og­nize the impor­tance of the pub­lic domain and the nature of cre­ativ­ity, per­haps this seems like no big deal. But if you look back through his­tory, you real­ize what an incred­i­bly big deal it is — and how immensely sti­fling this is on our cul­ture. And then you real­ize this is all done under a law whose sole pur­pose is to “pro­mote the progress” and you begin to won­der how this happened.

via Copyright Length And The Life Of Mickey Mouse | Techdirt.

The changes and restric­tions of copy­right are unprece­dented. Yet our tech­no­log­i­cal progress — and cul­tural out­put, at least — has grown expo­nen­tially over time, even as our IP restric­tions have increased. Is there a cor­re­la­tion or connection?

I believe over-​​restrictive copy­right ham­pers inno­va­tion, but I also believe it’s not a sim­ple equa­tion. It’s about bal­ance, and I’m look­ing for evi­dence to find the “sweet spot” that bal­ances the rights of cre­ators with the util­ity to end-​​users.

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