[A2k] A new copyright regime for cultural uses

[Michelle Childs]

 From Boing Boing Cory Doctorow

In my new Guardian column, "Copyright law should distinguish between
commercial and cultural uses," I argue for a new kind of copyright
law, one that mirrors the "folk copyright" that individuals have lived
by for

decades -- the alternative is to try to get kids and fans to
participate in the "real" copyright, a system of industrial regulation
so complex that it can barely be understood by full-time copyright
attorneys.
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.


,<snip>

A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this:
the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and
responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide
access to disabled users of information.

The drafting group - which is open to the general public - includes
representatives of creators' groups (tellingly, no one from the
corporations that buy creators' works have taken part), disabled
rights groups, technical standards bodies, civil rights groups, even
medical rights groups like M=E9decins Sans Fronti=E8res.

A2K is at the top of the WIPO agenda. It's the first breath of sanity
in the copyright debate. Let's hope it's not the last one.



Link:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/29/copyright.law



Michelle Childs
Head of European Affairs
Knowledge Ecology International
michelle.childs@cptech.org