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February 20, 2006
Cultural Environmentalism
by James Boyle
Dated: February 20, 2006
SOURCE: The Financial Times
Ten years ago, I tried to get an article about intellectual property published in a major US newspaper. It was a hard sell. I mentioned the words “internet” and “free speech” and “access to information.” “Ah,” said the editor, “so you want to write about porn and censorship.”
Not exactly. I wanted to write about software patents and the rules of digital copyright, about proposals that would have made internet service providers strictly liable for whatever their customers did online, about persistent retrospective extensions of copyright term that locked up most of 20th century culture, even if it was commercially unavailable, just at the moment when we could dream of making it digitally available to the world.
“But where is the free speech issue?” the editor asked. “Are these rules part of some covert effort to regulate indecency?” Free speech, it seemed, meant unfettered access to breasts – or at least digital images of them. Intellectual property was dry stuff of interest only to industry hacks. We were writing the ground rules of the information age, rules that had dramatic effects on speech, innovation, science and culture, and no one – except the affected industries – was paying attention.
For the full article, click here.
Posted by andrewanissi at February 20, 2006 06:20 PM