The lockdown and isolation that we’re all living through has brought certain realities to light; namely, that as much as many people may have lamented that much of life had moved online prior to March 2020, it was nothing compared to what we’re experiencing right now. The last bastions of in-person activites have shuttered or moved online out of necessity, creating a brave new world that no one could have entirely predicted or prepared for. It’s given us a new appreciation for the hassles of the physical world; personally, I’d give my paper towel supply to have the back of my seat kicked in a movie theater.
Continue reading “Online Education Exposes the Flaws of Copyright Law”
Our current moment of crisis requires some combination of ingenuity and communal spirit and flexibility and, well, the results thus far are a mixed bag. There are countless people willing to give of themselves and their time to help both medical workers working long hours with dangerously low supplies and those people thrown out of work as the national economy abruptly slammed to a halt and companies began laying off employees. There are also those unable or unwilling to let a good crisis go unexploited, and we can only hope that history will be as unforgiving of them as they deserve.
Nothing good can be said of the coronavirus, but to the extend that anything like the slightest silver lining on the darkest cloud can be seen, we can take the smallest amount of solace in the fact that banal misdeeds seem so much lesser now than they did a mere few weeks ago, and in fact almost seem a relief in comparison to the other news we’re forced to confront on a daily basis. In that spirit, here is a quant story about trade secrets that harkens back to a simpler time when corporate misdeeds felt like a relatively significant issue.
The story of copyright in the twenty-first century tends to be one of corporate overreach, though you perhaps can’t blame big business for trying; after all, it falls to regulatory and oversight bodies to rein in the worst actions and instances of IP abuse, and those institutions don’t always appear to be up to the challenge. That’s not to say the overstepping companies bear no culpability, just that you can’t expect those corporations to act in anything other than naked self-interest, and in the absence of someone telling them “no” they might assert rights they have no basis to claim.
Need is a strong motivator, and urgent need of the kind felt in many walks of life during this pandemic will hopefully spur the kind of ingenuity that is demanded at the moment. Need during times of crisis is also not generally subject to the kinds of normal restrictions of law and regulation that might normally apply, either due to a suspension of or flaunting of the law, and so it serves as a window to examine the efficacy or need of those particular laws. Intellectual property might feel ephemeral in a time like this, but the story of how copyright and medical care intersect show how it underpins so much of the work we do and how its enforcement can do more damage than good.
While this space remains focused on intellectual property and all matters related, I would like to take the occasion presented by the story covered today to talk briefly about the importance of Michael Jordan. The fact that he was important isn’t questioned by anyone who lived through the past thirty to thirty-five years as a sentient being, but he had a special significance to those of us who were kids at the point he was at the peak of his athletic and commercial powers. Words hardly do it justice; he was omnipresent and seemingly all-powerful, and anything that he deigned to endorse was a thing worth having, doubly so when your parents (rightfully, in retrospect) refused to accede to your whims and some clever marketing.
How long does our work survive beyond our time among the living? It’s not a question that the average person has to much consider, although given how the internet is bound to our current existence, it’s fair to say that traces of us will live on for years to come, even if you have to hit up the Wayback Machine to find them. For creators, questions about legacy and immortality are usually reserved for thinking of the collective consciousness, while realizing that the day will come when the financial benefits will disappear and the work will enter the public domain..jpg)
Who owns what we see online? It’s perhaps not a question we give too much thought about, at least beyond our own purview; so long as we don’t see something that we own or created on some website, we’re not too worried about the question, particularly given the overwhelming number of other worries we have on a daily basis.
It’s become so easy to expect the worst in the current crisis that it can be surprising when you see positive stories appear in the news, even if they’re at the periphery.
The general absurdity of YouTube’s copyright system is well-trod territory on this blog, but it’s always worth reiterating anytime the company bungles cases or otherwise misses the mark on IP matters; after all, YouTube is perhaps the repository of videos online, so if the copyright system is wrong on the site, it’s going to affect far more people than almost anywhere else.