Digital copyright scholar and teacher Jessica Litman has Webbed up a draft of a significant, new, and delightfully-written paper. You can download "Sharing and Stealing" as a .pdf file, but also explore and discuss it through a nice QuickTopic version.
I'm still rereading it, working through notes, but wanted to mention one of her major insights. While intellectual property in the form of songs and movies is moving towards a very controlled regime (DRM, tethered downloads, terror-subpoenas), information has already moved in the opposite direction. Googling, databases, information literacy, and a growing Web ethic of correcting mistaken infomation has yielded a very rich, shareable, public-domain-like space. Litman's provocation is to describe this as a success (with which I agree), then to see what IP can learn from it.
Comments