Post in Burningbird’s DRM Discussion
January 13th, 2006I posted a reply in a discussion of Digital Rights Management on Shelley Powers Burningbird weblog:
In regards to this statement:
But the same copyright laws that protect big corporations also are the same laws that protect individual artists’ rights. I know because I have used copyright to protect my own work from infringement.
I beg to differ. Big corporations are not people. It is disingenuous, at best, to imply that their rights somehow are equivalent to those of individual persons. The enormous concentrations of wealth and power that corporate entities have become — so powerful now that they are fundamentally subverting the system of free exchange of ideas, in the form of copyrights with reasonable limits, reasonably and narrowly defined patents, and subordination to the will of legislatures — can in no way be equated to individual persons.
It is ironic that corporations (and by the use of the word corporation here I refer especially to the 1% that control about 80% of our economy) are subverting the system of free scientific and cultural inquiry, created by legislative fiat (again, in the form of reasonable limits on scope and life of patents and copyright), that gave birth to them.
I would like to add, because it seems necessary to say so out loud, that a reasonable juridical system of copyright and patents is the best guarantor of the free exchange of ideas. The free exchange of ideas, coupled with robust legislative and judicial oversight, helps to ensure that markets are productive and flexible.
This is not the system we in the U.S. have now, and the recent extension of copyright life to absurd lifespans, as well as the distortions we are witnessing in the patent legal arena, serve the interests of an extremely narrow segment of society, and do not serve the general welfare.