Possible Futures Of Copyright

This Internet age has created vast opportunities and introduced complex issues. The idea of ownership, trademarks, copyrights and the attempt to restrict usefulness of ideas, concepts and developments for commercial purposes, including withholding them from the marketplace while insisting on protective ownership. The intention of protection based on economic investment and protection of that investment seems strangely out of step with the explosion of ideas and the resulting massive collaboration presently existing in the Internet. The concept that an idea not generated by an artificial entity, be it company, corporation, or conglomerate, can be held as restrictive property of that entity is suspect. Artificial entities do not think, conceive, invent, or make things. Their employees, officers, contractors and and partners (human) do however think, act, perform, conceive. That their thoughts should be owned and held from their own use is dehumanizing, and is a threat to their own economic well-being.

As a result much thinking and action needs to be done to protect the individual from acts of the artificial entity which inhibit creativeness and employment in areas of expertise by in individuals.

Some of the ideas introduced include:

CreativeCommons: Which licenses works for adaptation, use and modification. Allowing the use but holding the ownership by arrangement.

Another example of CopyWrong? attitudes occurs in the music business, wherein artists engaging in collage and sampling from other material to form their own unique creations are hunted down by the record industry's lawyers and (figuratively) beaten to death, if possible. One example of this is the Negativland/U2 case, in which Island Records nearly succeeded in taking Negativland out of business for releasing a single called "U2" which contained samples of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". For more information see "Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2", book+CD, 1995.

There is an important distinction here. We learn from the Negativland case that Corporate America has proven in the past that they do not recognize the Negativland-coined phrase "Art is not defined as a business", and they want to retain rights to anything their employees (in this case, the artists) create and exploit it (by any means necessary) for its full monetary potential. The distinction here is that regardless of your opinion of ProgrammingAsArt, it is undeniable wisdom that artists, not business, should determine what art will consist of. This is a cultural idiom. However, business determine what programmers do, so programmers are essentially WageSlaves.