Free Content
In a comment on my dictionary entry, Zen Viking called me on my rant about free content and challenged me to elaborate.
I am sure that given a lot of time, I could write a lengthy and well-reasoned treatise on this. I don’t want to spend time on this, though, which is part of why I think content should be free. If I have to pay, or enter a whole lot of personal information, or own a computer to access information, then information is slow to get, it’s unjust in distribution and makes doing what I’m doing (in this case, writing) more difficult.
Copyright laws were invented to encourage creators to create. Over the years, they have been warped by many, including Disney, to protect profit. I don’t believe that every book, magazine, movie, newspaper or DVD should be free. I do believe there should be a free form of it, though. I also believe that restrictive copyright laws do more harm than good.
If you are interested in delving into this issue more deeply, then my husband G. Grod recommends the work of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Lessig was also tapped as an artist of the year by the Minneapolis City Pages, but so were Kevin Smith and Garrison Keillor, so there is some dubiety to the distinction.
January 19th, 2005 at 9:43 am
I most definitely do agree that MOST content should be free, and I’m intrigued by the idea that a free form of ALL content SHOULD be available. I support it, in the abstract and as an ideal. I also agree that the Disnefication of the world extends to a rather radical view of what copyright is for. On the other hand, even in 1940, in the most excellent film version of “The Philadelphia Story,” Jimmy Stewart’s Macaulay Connor laments that he’ll never make a decent living as a writer, so long as there’s a library in town.
I’m not arguing from the RIAA’s position (and you can check my iPod and corroborate that). Information has a natural tendency toward freedom. Creators of content should always be free to choose to give it away. However, art and commerce have a long and storied history together, and that’s not always a bad thing.