Jeffery Tucker:
Then suddenly I received a take-down notice from a big magazine. The text itself was from their publication and the recording was unauthorized. It was a remix.
I explained that I had nothing to do with making the recording; I was merely linking it, and, moreover, I had no idea of the source. This settle nothing: the company was relentless in demanding either credit or take down. I was blown away by this. The Youtube poster from whom I linked had in fact credited the source. In any case, if they didn’t want someone to record the text, they shouldn’t have put it online. And, what’s more, why be upset about this? It is a great thing to have published something that someone else found worthy of spreading and remixing.
But the correspondent didn’t buy it.
...
The advocates of SOPA hear everything I just described as the glorification of piracy and looting on a mass scale. Collaboration is stealing. Learning is theft. Passing on and linking is graft. You can look, but you can’t act. You can hear, but not learn. There should be no consumption without contract and no competition under any circumstances.
To see an analogy of how they see the digital, consider television. Each channel does something different and their is no relationship between the channels. Each exists on its own. You are either watching one or you are watching another. It is ridiculous to speak of collaboration between them. No one “links” from one channel to another. We are not content providers to television. We are pure consumers, and a strict wall separates us from producers. This is the old world way of doing things, and it is precisely what the Internet changed everything.
Creative content should not be owned any longer than a drug patent grants ownership, neither should adding to creative content with proper citations be impermissible, as ownership of knowledge is anathema to knowledge itself.
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