Word: copyrighter
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...Gist: In his latest book, the Stanford professor and Wired columnist rails against the nation's copyright laws - regulations he believes are futile, costly and culturally stifling. Citing "hybrid" economies like YouTube and Wikipedia (both of which rely on user-generated "remixes" of information, images and sound), Lessig argues in favor of what he calls a "Read/Write (RW)" culture - as opposed to "Read/Only (RO)" - that allows consumers to "create art as readily as they consume...
...historical basis for creating a Read/Write culture: Lessig resurrects the testimony of American composer John Phillip Sousa, who went before Congress in 1906 to discuss copyright reform: "When I was a boy ... in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left.'" As Lessig explains, "Sousa was not offering a prediction about the evolution of the human voice box. He was describing how a technology ... would change...
...current copyright law: As Lessig explains, today's copyright laws regulate reproductions or "copies." But in a digital context, every time you listen to a song or play a video, that content is "copied" from a server somewhere to the hard drive in your computer. The same is not true when you crack open a book: "For most of American history it was extraordinarily rare for ordinary citizens to trigger copyright law ... RO culture in the digital age is thus open to control in a way that was never possible in the analog age ... For the first time, [copyright...
...birth of the "Copyright Wars": According to Lessig, the war began during the fall of 1995, when members of the "content industry" (read: media giants) began to grasp the implications of digital technology on copyright enforcement. (An analog tape was difficult to copy and disseminate. An MP3 file, on the other hand, just required the click of a mouse). "What before was both impossible and illegal is now just illegal," Lessig explains. In September of that year, movie studios and record labels met with the Commerce Department to map out a new legal strategy. The wildly popular and ill-fated...
Pirate Czar n.--A Cabinet-level job created by the recently signed antipiracy bill to oversee cases of copyright infringement and illegal downloading...