Word: copyright
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sordid history of the American copyright code is, well, sordid. Once upon a time to acquire a copyright (lasting 14 years, with option to renew once) you had to file lots of paperwork with the government. Through two centuries of litigation and legislation this process has come to be substantially amended: now to acquire a copyright (lasting your whole life, plus about 70 years), you simply publish. To use any piece of published content—which is automatically protected by copyright law—you must obtain permission from the copyright holder...
...real issue in question is, ironically, one of too little control: there simply have not been good mechanisms in place to allow copyright holders to specify when they don’t want to charge royalties or require permission. The copyright code itself, after years and years of strengthening by such neutral parties as Disney, (who, it should noted, renewed strongly their interest in copyright code around the time when they would have otherwise lost their exclusive rights to that famous big-eared mouse), is more or less unflappable at this point...
Fortunately, some smart lawyers and forward thinkers have finally started closing the gap. A movement called the “Creative Commons” led by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, has created an airtight legal license that allows would-be copyright holders to attach to their works a variety of freedoms. For example, an author might attach to one of their articles the permission to reprint with attribution, but without explicit consent, for noncommercial purposes. Currently the licenses can allow for such things as sampling of multimedia or requiring that people only release derivative works under the same sort...
...recent years, fewer and fewer have been able to say that intellectual-property theory does not affect their lives. The battles over copyright law have been fought individual by individual, computer by computer, far beyond Harvard’s campus...
Still, he doesn’t see the shattered windows going back up over copyright...