A science-fiction author thinks about copyright:
Cory Doctorow is thinking about control of information and technology as the deciding factor — leading to a new colonialism: “As you’d expect, I think the social future is tied up intimately with copyright, since copyright is the body of law that most closely regulates technology (copying, distributing, and producing are all inherently technological in nature and change dramatically when new tech comes along). Copyright also has the distinction of being the area of law/policy that deals most copiously in crazy-ass metaphors, such as the comparison of copying to “theft” — even though the former leaves a perfectly good original behind, while the latter deprives the owner of her property. Finally, copyright is the area of law most bound up with free expression, which makes it a hotbed of socio-technical storylines. “Property law deals with instances of ideas — a physical chair — while “Intellectual Property” law deals with the ideas themselves — a plan for a chair. Increasingly, though, the instantiation of an idea and the idea itself: a electronic text, an MP3, a fabrication CAD/CAM file.
“Traditionally, new nations have exempted themselves from IP regulation (as the US did for its first century, enthusiastically pirating the IP of the world’s great powers). When you’re a net importer of IP, there’s no good economic reason to treat foreign ideas as sacrosanct property. Indeed, piracy and successful industrialization go hand in hand.
“Today, though, the developing world has been strong-armed into affording IP protection to foreign ideas, usually by tying IP enforcement to other trade elements (“If you give us fifty more years of copyright, we’ll double our soybean quota!”), which is working out to be a disaster. No one in Brazil or South Africa can pay American street-prices for pharmaceuticals — or CDs, or DVDs, or books, or software. A guy in Maastricht worked out that if every Burundi copy of Windows were legitimately purchased, the country would have to turn over 67.65 months’ worth of its total GDP to Microsoft. This is the impending disaster, a new form of colonialism that makes the old forms look gentle and beneficent by comparison.”
(Thanks to Franklin Harris.)
11:55 am on September 15, 2004
