Corporate heavyweights like Disney and RIAA have been gaming copyright law for years. Congress played along, giving the big guys one “feature” after another. Now the whole system is an ugly mess.
Two MIT students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, just set up a music-sharing network that deftly dodges every copyright bullet, or do I mean bully?
“The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become.”
“It’s almost an act of performance art,” said Jonathan Zittrain, one of the Berkman Center’s gurus of Internet law.
Sensible rules–like “Thou shalt not kill” or Sergey Brin’s “Don’t be evil”–are simple. Simple rules are easy to obey and hard to dodge.
“More isn’t always better, Linus. Sometimes it’s just more.”
2 responses so far ↓
1 jr // Oct 27, 2003 at 4:59 pm
I’ve been thinking alot about the idea of critical junctions where the stubornness of those that want to stiffle progress for their own greed end up sending people in total new and interesting directions. As Scott said to Bones (or the other way around) How do we know he didn’t invent Liquid Aluminum!
2 Stu Savory // Nov 3, 2003 at 1:28 am
How about Crowley’s simple rule:
Do What Thou Wilt, Save Harm None, Shall Be the Whole . . .