Rasmus Fleischer, writing for Cato Unbound, makes the argument that the atavistic way we think about copyright is a poor fit for the digital age:
Creative practices, with some exceptions, thrive in economies where digital abundance is connected to scarce qualities in space and time. But there can never be a question of finding one universal business model for a world without copyright. The more urgent question regards what price we will have to pay for upholding the phantasm of universal copyright.The glorious advent of the digital bit freed us from so many of the limits of the analog age, but those limits still drive the way we still think about copyright. The simplest example is one that Rasmus uses, where we draw distinctions without difference between and streaming (kinda okay) and downloading (terrifying) because we want to retrofit our ideas to the old z100 vs. Tower Records model. It's certainly tricky to draw bright lines when the one between our personal consumption of content and the distribution over our social networks is incredibly fuzzy; that's what makes Muxtape -- where you can create and share mixtapes with all your millions of online friends -- so head scratching.
But rather than Washington and industry trying to draw the largest bounty from the end of scarcity, when it comes to legislating copyright we seem to be quite dedicated to constantly finding new ways to recreate the old chains that limited what we were able to do. (via Ezra Klein)
