Theoria

For the most part, copyright is arcane and uninteresting to me. Yet, I found myself browsing an article by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Columbia Journalism Review entitled “Copyright Jungle,” on Google’s desire to digitize everything ever written. The following stuck out to me – not as an argument in favour of copyright law, but as an argument against it:

Copyright is the right to say no. Copyright holders get to tell the rest of us that we can’t build on, revise, copy, or distribute their work. That’s a fair bargain most of the time. Copyright provides the incentive to bring work to market. It’s impossible to imagine anyone anteing up $300 million for Spider-Man 3 if we did not have a reasonable belief that copyright laws would limit its distribution to mostly legitimate and moneymaking channels.

If it means that the world would be spared future “Spiderman” movies or, indeed, movies featuring Tobey Maguire or Kirsten Dunst in general, then I’m all in favour of getting rid of copyright law.