July 21st, 2008
Posted by Richard Koman @ July 21, 2008 @ 8:11 AM
Sunday’s installment of To the Best of Our Knowledge features an interview with Larry Lessig, back at least briefly it seems, on the Re/Mix wars. One of his main themes in that interview was quite apropos of a comment on my post about the mom suing Universal over take-down notices.
Lessig’s point was that today’s copyright laws are effectively Prohibition 2.0. Read the above comment substituting “drinking” for “using copyright material.” Just as in prohibition, we have outlawed basic behavior — the urge for a drink, the urge to comment on some aspect of our culture. And the effect, he warns, may be the same. In the 1930s, society saw their basic desires criminalized and they further saw rife corruption, taking advantae of the legal status of alcohol. Everybody obtained booze: everybody was a criminal. The sheriffs and g-men were criminals too; they took their “piece of the action.”
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