Techdirt has posed the question of whether it’s possible to plagiarize a photograph (Jonathan Lethem’s article The Ecstasy of Influence is particularly interesting).
Ironically, the post immediately before that is about how the patent system is keeping Indonesia from sharing avian flu samples (for more about this, check out HealthySimplicity’s post on Indonesia’s avian flu samples).
Jonathan Lethem’s argument is that all art and writing is based on what could be considered the intellectual property of others.
Even Microsoft’s newest operating system is reputed to be based on many ideas that Apple came up with.
Copyright and intellectual property, as Techdirt correctly points out, are all about incentives. In the article above, Indonesia simply has no economic incentive to share their samples with the rest of the world.
Creating incentives to allow people (and on a larger scale, organizations and countries) to share knowledge is no small task. But in this case, incentives are in place that go against the very nature of human knowledge sharing (and in this case, the progress of medical science).
At least Captain Copyright won’t be visiting anyone any time soon.
And hopefully Steve Jobs’ call to abolish digital rights management will start to catch on.
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February 13th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[...] “Creating incentives to allow people (and on a larger scale, organizations and countries) to s…Â is how UncommonKnowledge so eloquently puts it. [...]
February 15th, 2007 at 11:32 am
[...] Copyright and the art of plagiarism. [...]
February 15th, 2009 at 6:43 am
I wouldn’t count on Jobs to break down DRM. He’s currently fighting for it, and against exemptions to the DMCA, when it comes to jailbreaking the iPhone.
Edit: Oops. Please pardon the reviving of such an old post. I didn’t notice it was made Feb 13th two years ago, I thought it was only a couple days old. Coincidentally, Techdirt posted an article on taking photos out of the public domain February 13th 2009, which I assumed you linked to at the beginning.
February 17th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
No problem lance, I’m always happy to get comments even on old posts. Your comment is especially interesting since we can now see what Jobs’ stance turned out to actually be. I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, I don’t think I have much hope of Apple being a crusader for breaking DRM (as you said).
It’s unfortunate, because I think a company like Apple has a great opportunity for making headway in this area. It’s just a reminder that even though Apple’s marketing portrays them as ‘outside the mainstream’, they are in fact, a very mainstream company in many ways (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing of course, depending on the specifics).