It’s time to stop talking about copyright
Cory Doctorow: It’s Time to Stop Talking About Copyright
“The story of modern Internet regulation and copyright goes back (at least) to 1995 and Al Gore’s National Information Infrastructure hearings, where Bruce Lehman, Bill Clinton’s copyright czar, pushed for expansive new copyright rules for the net. These proposals were pretty bonkers, so Gore sent him packing, and he scurried off to Geneva, to the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, where he instigated the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which became US law in 1998, as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
We’ve been arguing about copyright and the Internet for at least 16 years now, and the arguments keep going back and forth over well-defined ground, wearing deep grooves in the discourse.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century: copyright policy ceased to exist. Because every copyright policy that we make has a seismic effect on the Internet, and because you can’t regulate copying without regulating the Internet.” […]