Lessing, Bollier, Boyle, and McLeod

January 28, 2005 12:22 PM

Fair Use and "Digital Environmentalism" - NYU journalism head Robert Boynton reviews four recent books (the 4th) about intellectual property and the public domain.
posted by mrgrimm (2 comments total)

Ohh, here we go again.

I think this is a good review of the problem some of the writing about the problem. And as an opening shot in the debate to follow, the issue is not about whether creative people have a right to their own works. For good or for ill, congress is empowered to grant such rights for a limited time. If history is any indication, the rights of IP holders have been steadily expanded and are likely to be expanded in the future.

Instead, what is at stake are the continued existence of rights that copyright law grants to everyone: fair use, satire, criticism, parody, the existence of a commons of public domain.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:47 PM on January 28, 2005

One thing I see happening in the next 50 years or so is IP-related squabbles becoming more and more of a 1st-world/3rd-world issue, with poorer, underprivileged consumer nations balking at paying the rich guys licensing/patent/copyright fees.
Kind of like what happened in Brasil re:AIDS medicine.
posted by signal at 2:34 PM on January 28, 2005