Here are a couple of brief excerpts from Craft and Copyright by Wendy Seltzer in the current issue:
Artisans have always learned their trade by copying their predecessors, picking up a pen, a brush, or chisel first to imitate, then to reinvent. Too strict an application of copyright may stifle the very creativity it is meant to promote.
So when fashion designers petition Congress to make their patterns copyrightable, they not only push aside creative reinvention, they open a new door for copyright-based threats. Yet the field has seen great creativity without copyright's incentives -- the drive to stay ahead of copyists may even be good for the fashion cycle, while adding more copyright would put a thicket of licensing in the way of creative re-styling. As both creators and remixers, crafters should insist on balance in copyright law.
Part 2 will be in the next issue, so don't miss it.
And, here's a bit by author Cory Doctorow from the Guardian:
This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it’s not’s really culture if you’re not sharing it, is it?).
It’s also a dumb idea. People aren’t going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy’s comic book. They’re also not going to stop doing culture.
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.
For those interested in the subject, I highly recommend reading both of these articles in full. And don't just believe everything you read about copyright on Yahoo! Groups or in Vogue Knitting. There are other perspectives that are, in my opinion, much more enlightened and intelligent. And, yes, that's how I really feel.
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