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Rarely a day goes by on the webernets when someone isn't either decrying DRM, announcing a new form of DRM or demanding more DRM. It's probably obvious by now that I don't like DRM and I refuse to use anything that has DRM.
But DRM is really just a method of trying to enforce copyright. Earlier this week Steve Jobs [wrote an essay][5] slamming DRM and professing a wish to get rid of it, which got me thinking that really there is no way to get rid of DRM without making some radical changes to U.S. copyright law.
[Jonathan Lethem][4], author the novel *Motherless Brooklyn*, had one of the best essays I've ever read on the issue of copyright in the last issue of Harpers. The article, entitled [*The Ecstasy of Influence*][6], is now online and, while I admit it's quite long, I encourage you to read it through to the end, because at the end you'll discover something -- most of what Lethem writes is borrowed, copied and re-appropriated from other texts.
Even the authorial "I" of the article is often not the "I" of Lethem himself, but that of other authors ranging from Lawrence Lessig to David Foster Wallace. Not only does Lethem make an incredibly cohesive, well-reasoned argument for a more open copyright system, but he does so using the very methods and results he's advocating.
Here's a clip:
>If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones—more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths—The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of "plagiarisms" that links Ovid's "Pyramus and Thisbe" with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land. If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.
I'm something of a copyright nut, the first thing I did while playing with [Yahoo's new Pipes tool][7] was try to create a mashup of newsfeeds that just track the word copyright. Unfortunately the site went down before I could get it set up, but when I do I'll add a link to the bottom of this article if anyone is interested. My personal feeling on copyright is nicely summed up by Woodie Guthrie:
>This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.
Lethem, along with [Mike Doughty][1], [Mark Hosler][2], and [Siva Vaidhyanathan][3] were also on PRI's Open Source Radio last night to talk about issues of copyright. The broadcast repeats much of the article but is still a marvelous listen and it's available online (mp3).
>Why do we need a term like open source? Why do we need a term to apply to cultural production and distribution? Why do we need a term like open source to apply to software? The reason is that in just the last twenty or thirty years we've seen the rise of a completely different model of cultural distribution, what I call the proprietary model.
>...
>What we think of as open source is basically culture, it's how human beings have organized themselves, communicated with each other, joined each other, forged identities and most importantly grooved and danced for centuries. This is basically how people have always dealt with each other. It's just in recent years that we've imposed these interesting cages, legal cages, psychological cages, ethical cages around this level of sharing.
The suggestion here is not that copyright should be abolished, but that it was working just fine before Disney and Sonny Bono got hold of it. Of course the ultimate irony being that almost nothing Disney has ever done is remotely original.
Think about this way, if Bob Dylan were just starting out today, he'd be sued out of existence.
[1]: http://www.mikedoughty.com/ "Mike Doughty"
[2]: http://www.negativland.com/ "Mark Hosler founder of Negativland"
[3]: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/ "Siva Vaidhyanathan Associate Professor of Culture and Communication, New York University"
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Lethem "Wikipedia: Jonathan Lethem"
[5]: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ "Thoughts on Music"
[6]: http://www.harpers.org/TheEcstasyOfInfluence.html "The Ecstasy of Influence"
[7]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/02/yahoo_launches_.html "Yahoo Launches Pipes"
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