The Future of Copyright

Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) has a great little article in The Guardian titled “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses”. This is something that I have been thinking about for quite some time. Since we are in the business of tracking images and videos, fair use and copyright infringements are daily conversations at Idée (in a good way, we are idealists after all!). I have to say that I agree with Cory and it is high time we started thinking about a copyright overhaul. What we have had in the past is simply a set of copyright rules that apply to everyone “from Sony Pictures to your neighbour’s eight-year-old” but the world has changed and then came the Internet….

“We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.”

and there is a way for you to get involved and shape things.