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Infernal machines, or, change is inevitable

By RCP

Here is a video. I warn you, it is 19 minutes long, but it is worth every minute.

The speaker is Larry Lessing, a law professor at Stanford University. The essential point of his presentation (which you really should watch) is that copyright has evolved in the past to adapt to changing technologies. Ditto with other long standing principals of law (he cites, as an example of the latter, the long held principal that the owner of land owns the column of air above the land to infinity and the ground beneath the land to the centre of the earth). This principal met its match with the arrival of the air plane, and  no one mentions it any more.

Similarly, Prof. Lessing believes that we need to use common sense to dictate how copyright will be used in the future in a world where virtually everything a person does on the internet involves the material of other people. This creativity should not be stifled, indeed his argument is that it cannot be stifled. It should be encouraged and allowed to compete along side the copyrighted material produced and sold by everyone.

I must make clear that he does not believe copyright should be abolished. Indeed, he calls it one of to untenable extremes (the other being that any content which contains even a snippet of copyrighted materials should be crushed and eliminated by the copyright owner).

A worthwhile 19 minutes in my view.

Full post as published by Atlanteknology - Technology News for Atlantic Canada on November 21, 2007 (boomark / email).