300th anniversary of copyright
To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, (the first modern copyright law) the British Council asked a lot of people with strong ideas about copyright, from the CEO of Random House to the founder of Wikipedia, to remark on what copyright is for and how it might be improved.
her are some of the great quotes
“If there’s one lie more corrosive to creativity above all others, it is the lie of romantic individual originality. Today, ‘copyright curriculum’ warns schoolchildren not to be ‘copycats’ – to come up with their own original notions.
We are that which copies. Three or four billion years ago, by some process that we don’t understand, molecules began to copy themselves. We are the distant descendants of those early copyists – copying is in our genes. We have a word for things that don’t copy: ‘dead’.
Walk the streets of Florence and you’ll find a ‘David’ on every corner: because for half a millennium, Florentine sculptors have learned their trade by copying (but try to take a picture of ‘David’ on his plinth and you’ll be tossed out by a security guard who wants to end this great tradition in order to encourage you to buy a penny postcard)
If copyright law is to truly nurture art and creativity, rather than merely lining the pockets of the last generation of copyists who now declare themselves to be pure of all replication and wholly original from the first word to the last, it ‘must’ recognize and celebrate the wonderful thing that is copying.”
via cory doctorow (is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger)
“After all, nothing is created in isolation, and nothing comes of nothing. The products of the creative imagination do not stand alone, unique products of one mind or one company. Perhaps the fact of creation should not, in itself, allow the effective expropriation of the intellectual common ground as a reward for adding something new to the rich and complex stew of culture.
If those advising Queen Anne had seen how copyright has stymied creative expression, placed barriers around so much modern culture and distorted our use of the Internet, the most powerful machine for sharing ever devised, then they might have thought differently.
So let us then recast copyright as a grant of stewardship over an element of our common inheritance, offered to a person or institution‚ for a limited period, but see it not as a privilege but a burden, one that charges its holders with an onerous responsibility which they can best discharge by ensuring the widest possible dissemination, full access by all means possible, and the maximum feasible use and reuse‚ of any copyright material they hold.
In this world anyone granted a ‘copyright’ is obliged to use it to fertilise the fields of creative endeavour, knowing that history – and not the market – will be their judge.”
via bill thompson (technology critic and blogs at andfinally.com)
