copy-right wrong

In Lessig’s chapter on piracy he speaks of the changing nature of copy-right law saying,

“Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It sets the groundwork for a richly creative society, but remains subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the instrument that we are losing sight of the value.

I think that what this is saying is that we usually view intellectual property as a a free source from which other creative thought and direction can be born. Now, paranoia in large part due to piracy, has made us so paranoid about the actual intellectual property that we stop accepting the value in creativity that is birthed from another individuals intellectual property.

This makes me think of the recent lawsuits against writers such as Dan Brown and JK Rowling, where you have other writers claiming that these more successful writers stole their ideas. We are living in a modern state of copyright paranoia to the point where someone who first wrote about a space ship having green-laser beams, feels that this is now their property. Anyone else that talks about a green-laser beam spacecraft, must give them due credit. With the argument that in postmodernism noting is new, but rather everything is borrowing and expanding on some past idea, copyright law that focused simply on idea would spiral out of control, with no one ever allowed to produce anything creative.

The example of the Girl Scouts getting sued by a composers organization for not buying the right to their songs is ridiculous. Am I not allowed to sing songs out loud with my friends in the car because that is copyright of someone else’s creative property? Can we not read book out loud anymore? These people who are creating lawsuits like this are retarded, and probably the root of all evil.

If any of these law suits ever won in a large court, it could be devastating to creative freedom. When we are not offering up intellectual property to be engaged with in new ways we are stifling creativity and losing sight of the purpose of these things to begin with.