Cory Doctorow's essay on the web and artist's rights
Traditional media forces — and some short-sighted artists' groups — have attacked the intertubes as havens of pirates and demanded "solutions" that copyfightin' Cory Doctorow attacks as both wrongheaded and futile in the current Locus Magazine. Long a proponent of Creative Commons and teh Webz, Doctorow — who has said that the real enemy of the artist is not piracy, but rather obscurity — offers a compelling case for "history's greatest free-speech machine."
Doctorow argues that the web, by destroying traditional models of publishing, has created new opportunities for artists and new rights far more valuable than those allegedly being trampled by free, disintermediated authorship. He sets the stage by talking about how the web has completely changed the game for writing:
Tomorrow's lives will be remembered by the historians of the day-after-tomorrow with astounding clarity and thoroughness, reconstructed through the midden of personal blips, twits, and chirps emitted by our social tools. By comparison, our own lives will be as opaque and unimaginable as the lives of the poor schmucks who inhabited the same cave for 200,000 years, generation after generation leaving no mark more permanent than a mouldering knucklebone lost in the soil.
Paradoxically, it is this very feature that leads many artists to view these sites with suspicion and derision. A common refrain goes like this: "These sites are filled with pirated material and they know it. They're making money off our work, and the only ‘redeeming' quality they have is that a bunch of idiots get to talk about their cats around the clock and around the world."
Could these sites be remade to prevent infringement, and if they could, what would that mean for free expression?
— Via Locus
Here's the money quote: Even if Blogger, LiveJournal, Weblogs, Inc, and TypePad could afford to hire the lawyers necessary to review this material for infringement, the fact is that there aren't enough lawyer-hours between now and the heat-death of the universe to do so.
Take five minutes to click through to read the whole thing. Doctorow is an award-winning sf writer and one of the founders of BoingBoing. Full disclosure: I've done workshops with Cory and think he's an absolutely brilliant writer and one of the sf folks who really gets this stuff.