Dave Winer responds to my
Dave Winer responds to my copyright rant:
“The glitch in Ritter’s rant is the assumption that people would respect the copyright on the source. I doubt they would. Competition is good, but let’s have some barriers to entry.”
It’s a glitch, alright, but not mine. :-) Copyright didn’t exist prior to 1710, and is a result of the rise of mass reproduction technologies and distribution architectures. However, those technologies were unwieldy, expensive, and time-consuming.
The glitch Dave identifies is the fundamental flaw of copyright itself: the legal concept of copyright was never designed to contend with the technological environment we have today. Prior to the last thirty or so years, the cost of reproduction/redistribution technology was so prohibitive that the idea of “respecting” copyright was moot — the average consumer couldn’t afford to violate copyright.
The long term solution probably isn’t to wage a “War on Piracy,” which is what we — or, at least, Congress, the RIAA, and others — have been doing. I’m not sure what the long term solution is, but like the “War on Drugs,” the current approach of legislating respect or techically enforcing it is likely only to result in rapid-fire, poorly thought-out legislation and technology that impinges on the legitimate rights of consumers and diminishes the public good. In the long run, it costs us all more than would be lost.
Given that, I have to ask myself if copyright makes sense in our current environment? Was it ever a Good Idea™? And the best answer I can come up with is “I’m not sure.” I think it might turn out that copyright was just a 300-year blip in legal history.