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I had a really great run this morning--It was one of those increasingly rare (rare, of course, as we race, here in Texas, down towards the hell of summer), rare mornings when it wasn't too hot or too humid and, as a bit of gilty gingerbread, for my part I didn't feel too old and decrepit and over-sweaty as I ran: and so it's not surprising that (after my shower and a pretty-well stress-free and traffic-light friendly drive) I was singing quietly to myself as I walked from the car park to my office. I was, in fact, singing...
"Ho! Hiiii!
"Ho! Hi!
"Ho, hi, ho, hi it's off to work go I"
which is of course the Yod... I-I mean, the generically-short-green-marshal-arty-alien-syntax inspired, copyright-lawyer aware version of some other song all rights to which are viciously held by those Dizzney Rascals (an appellation that, to continue our new stance of being legally cautious, is in no way intended to infringe upon the trademark of the British Hip-Hop invader Dizzee Rascal )---all the above being covered of course by the fair-use provisions of all of the relevant international copyright legislation! So there!!! Nyaa! Nyaa!!
All of which, I suppose, you can take to be a slight indication that, in spite of being myself in a small way a member of the Allied Creative Trades (and so presumably vigilant of my own rights), I am less than unbelievably happy with the current state of copyright in this world---and almost certainly of its state in the next world too (as you'll find out if you keep listening). And so there I was, as I got to my office, having stopped singing because I was now so overcome with thoughts of all of those evil copyright lawyers who, were there any justice in the world, would to a man, woman or whatever-they-are meet Jack Cade and Dick the Butcher down some dark dark Shakespearian passage---there I was thinking about all this iniquity when I remembered reading a review in New Scientist of a book called "Free Culture" which apparently dealt with just this subject. So as soon as I got to my desk I did a quick search for it on the web. And to my amazement I discovered that, in an unusual example of someone's actions speaking at almost exactly the same volume as their words, its author, a Professor Lessig of Stanford, has actually made his fascinating book available for free on the web. So I downloaded it. Now I haven't had a chance to read much of it yet , but in the introduction I found a bit where he said: "A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights" adding that "The opposite of a free culture is a 'permission culture'—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past."
Now while I'm sure that the good professor has more rational places to take this, to me it seems to scream that creations should belong inalienably to the actual creator---so that, for example, the tridigitality of the Disney Mouse hand, a stupendous discovery and clearly one much more important to our understanding of perception than, say, that overrated Renaissance rubbish-discovery of perspective: that dropping of a digit should belong solely to the guy who dropped it, not to some vast amorphous (come to think of it that should probably be hyper-morphous) collection of drooling lawyers. And when he (or, since we are being cautious and of course since that is just a grammatical 'he', she) dies then the copyright should die with ...them. I mean why should some ghost, who probably doesn't really need that royalty fee still get it (especially if it actually goes to those worthless kids who probably spent all their time when he was alive distracting him from getting on with his work). And why should the evil rich and powerful be able to get more of all of the above from him or anyone else through royalties just because they are all of the above. This vile appropriation by the guys at the top has been going on for far too long, why, for instance, way back in time, back in Britain, Hadrian probably had a lot less to do with the actual creation of Hadrian's Wall than its name might at first suggest, and I'm sure that in China the eponymous Mr Great probably had even less to do with his wall.
Well.
Cheerio for now (a wholly owned copyright service mark of the Howland-Bolton Consortium, which can only be used with the permission of the owner and payment of a hefty fee)
from Richard Howland-Bolton.
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