Dienstag, 23. November 2004
Bibliomanie
In der taz hat Tom Wolf heute auf der Wahrheitsseite einen schönen
Text über Buchversessenheit platziert:
Auszug:
"Bibliomanie ist eine der großen schleichenden Krankheiten
unserer Tage", sagte die Psychologin Irmgard Reißer-Brand, die
sich in ihrer Bucher Praxis auf die schwierige Therapie der als
unheilbar geltenden Schädigung des nervus exlibris im Cerebrum
spezialisiert hat. zum Volltext
um 23:53 in /biblio [#]
Blog on the Commons
David Bollier hat ein neues Portal/Blog ins Leben gerufen. Es heißt On The Commons und gibt mittels
aufgeräumtem Design einen allgemeinverständlichen Einstieg in die
Commons-Problematik. Zum Probelesen übernehme ich einen Beitrag von
Bollier zur Debatte um das Geistige Eigentum, einen Begriff den nicht
nur GNU-Vater Richard Stallman
für problematisch hält. OnTheCommons.org steht unter einer CC-Lizenz:
hier ist ein Rip :-)
One of the great
fallacies in various copyright debates is that intellectual property
should be treated the same way as physical property. Jack Valenti, the
film industry's top lobbyist until recently, is famous for comparing
unauthorized uses of copyrighted works to theft. If someone uses my
car or enters my house without permission, why, that's wrong. So it's
only common sense to see that using my "intellectual
property" is also morally wrong.
Now, finally, Mark A. Lemley, a noted legal scholar at Stanford, has
devoted an entire law review article to explaining why such
analogies are bogus, and how "content owners" use them to
expand legal control over their works and curb the public's fair use
rights. Lemley's is an important argument. Until we begin to
understand how copyright and trademark law are NOT like other
property, we will never be able to defend the public's stake in
intellectual property law. Copyright is a form of social policy or
government regulation, not a natural right that is absolute.
In "Property, Intellectual Property and Free Riding,"Lemley
argues that traditional property law has been invoked as a way to
assert broader legal control over music, film and writing. But
"the rhetoric and economic theory of real property," Lemley
writes, fundamentally distorts the actual economics of creative works.
Land and other physical property are finite; if one person uses my
car, I cannot. Economists call such goods "rivalrous." But
music, film, books and other creative works -- especially if they are
in digital formats -- can be easily reproduced and cannot be
"used up." Indeed, their real value comes through their
circulation among people. As economists would put it, there are
"positive externalities" that are created when a copyrighted
work is freely available. Indeed, this is the essence of culture --
the free appropriation, sharing and modification of other people's
creative and informational works.
By applying property law to intangible works that are essentially
non-depletable, corporations wih large inventories of copyrighted
works are able to pull off a neat trick. They invoke the idea of
"free riders" to justify an expansion of copyright law and
the suppression of unauthorized uses of a work. The term
"intellectual property" had little currency until the early
1980s, when its use skyrocketed. It is time, writes Lemley, to
confront the distortions of property law as applied to intangible
works: "Intellectual property has come of age; it no longer needs
to turn to some broader area of legal theory to seek legitimacy. The
economics of intellectual property law should focus on the economic
characteristics of intellectual property rights, not on inapposite
economic analysis borrowed from the very different case of land."
(Quelle: David Bollier in his Blog on the commons)
um 23:49 in /copy [#]
