Month: January 2004

In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

The Tyranny of Copyright?
New York Times Sunday Magazine

A protest movement is forming, made up of lawyers, scholars and activists who fear that bolstering copyright protection in the name of foiling ”piracy” will have disastrous consequences for society — hindering the ability to experiment and create and eroding our democratic freedoms. This group of reformers, which Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, calls the ”free culture movement,” might also be thought of as the ”Copy Left” (to borrow a term originally used by software programmers to signal that their product bore fewer than the usual amount of copyright restrictions). Lawyers and professors at the nation’s top universities and law schools, the members of the Copy Left aren’t wild-eyed radicals opposed to the use of copyright, though they do object fiercely to the way copyright has been distorted by recent legislation and manipulated by companies like Diebold. Nor do they share a coherent political ideology. What they do share is a fear that the United States is becoming less free and ultimately less creative. While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it.