As the World Turns

I suspect this week's readings are right up Alan's alley but, with the exception of a few portions in each article, they were predominately at the cross-roads of law and economics--two subjects I don't care to study. The soap-opera like conditions in Telling Tales Out of School were a useful wrapper in the discussion of ownership in corporatist universities but at times reminded me of Henrietta Lacks, Revisited.

While I knew something about the ways in which copyright law has evolved over the centuries, the long quote in Intellectual Property and the Liberal State reminded me how irrational it sounds to justify a decision, any decision really, by claiming it will undermine a whole host of related activities. That an author loses all control of their work as it is disseminated was covered in a previous reading, which one I am unsure, but that only considered the intellectual component. Perhaps the Labor Theory that incorporated millers and printers into a book was relevant in a time when books were still something of an art form in an age of poor literacy relatively poor rates of reproducibility. As more people have the intelligence and leisure to read books and printing is less arduous the financial incentive increases with this new capacity. It seems....

I also enjoyed the nuances of the Cultures and Copyrights article which elaborated on the creolization of copyright law in Australia. The author claimed that sacredness was being injected into copyright law but I feel the case was reasonably made by Intell Prop in Lib State when it argued that the romantic idea of authorship, mainly inspiration and originality by using community resources like language, culture, etc, injected sacredness into copyright law quite some time ago.

Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age made an interesting and admittedly flawed argument in favor of vernacular laws based on common sense in an age of wide dissemination. Too often our societies can't deal with problems of such a scale because any sweeping action would instigate large and powerful groups and change our very conception of, in this case, copyright law. In politics these are called "Third Rail" issues. President Bush knew Social Security had problems and proposed a privatization scheme which may have alleviated the coming crisis but is instead a signature domestic failure for a president who will probably be remembered for foreign policy. Health care is a similar third rail. By the author of Revising Copyright Law looking at the problem and proposing solutions, he's assisting the necessary dialogue as the controlling means of information are lost or disseminated. I doubt much has or will come of it, however. Greed and shortsightedness are fairly common attributes of agents whose primary concern is profit.