Usually, I just go back and add the information to the original post, even though I know the odds of anyone seeing it are slim. But in this case, as a supplement to my recent post about the end of copyright (cleverly disguised as a post about a cheesy 1970's action TV show), here's a good essay about the end of copyright.
I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of a major era in world history. It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but the age of copyright is drawing to a close. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s inevitable. And I say this as the author of two books and over 75 columns like this one, all copyrighted.
This especially ties into the point that someone recently conveyed me about how people struggle to hold onto something hardest when they know it's already over (paging Hillary Clinton!
)Right now, the music and movie industries are howling and beating their breasts and doing their best to go after anybody who violates their copyrights on a large scale. The fury with which they’re doing it is a measure of their desperation. The Sony rootkit debacle is a perfect example: in an effort to prevent piracy, they secretly installed dangerous spyware into people’s PCs, which itself may have been a criminal act. This was about the dumbest public-relations move since Take-Two lied about the Hot Coffee content, and as with Take-Two, it will cost them vastly more than they could hope to gain from it. Did they really think nobody would find out?
