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Here we'll explore the nexus of legal rulings, Capitol Hill
policy-making, technical standards development, and technological
innovation that creates -- and will recreate -- the networked world as we
know it. Among the topics we'll touch on: intellectual property
conflicts, technical architecture and innovation, the evolution of
copyright, private vs. public interests in Net policy-making, lobbying
and the law, and more.
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What Does "Copyfight" Mean?
Copyfight, the Solo Years: April 2002-March 2004
1. Neo on February 20, 2005 7:07 AM writes...
"The public domain, a commons that anyone can freely draw from, runs counter to the guiding ideology of our hyper-commercialized, free-market age."
I have to take issue with this statement from the pdf. A functioning free market should drive the price of any goods down to about the marginal cost of reproduction. For an information good in the Internet age, that's precisely zero. Only we don't have a free market -- every copyright is a state-sanctioned, state-enforced monopoly. A true free market ideologue must therefore be entrenched on our side of the copyfight! If you believe there should be at least some copyright, even just very short terms with only nearly-identical derivative works covered, then you cannot be exalting the free market above all else, because a free market will make information available at about cost, and on the internet that means free, since you couldn't charge much above cost without a competitor undercutting and then the transaction costs grow to dominate, making charging anything uneconomical.
The ideology of the hypercommercialized age is not a free market ideology; it is a get rich by hook or by crook and by manipulation of the masses ideology. Fortunately it is also an obsolete ideology, since the future is narrowcasting and mass media manipulation of our minds will pass with mass media into the dustbin of history. Our descendants in the 22nd century will categorize it in the same category of ideological/economic quanitness as aristocracies, feudalism, slavery, communism, and fascism. They will probably also categorize war the same way, since without either feudalism, communism, fascism, or mass media you can't force nor manipulate lots of people into fighting anything other than a tangible and immediate threat to themselves and their freedom. Questionable military actions such as Vietnam that do not address an imminent threat of invasion of one's own borders will no longer be manageable.
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