OK, folks,to those of you thinking this is somehow “new”, no. Amazon showed they could do this half a decade ago with … yes, Irony, “much”… Copies of 1984 bought for American kindles on the Amazon.ca (canada) website. The IP terms were such that they were legal to sell to Canadians in Canada but not to Americans in the USA.
Amazon reached in and removed the copies from American-owned Kindles without any permission and without any warning. They did refund the purchase price to those whose copies they removed, but it showed the essential issue behind “licensure” and DRM that everyone should have sat up and take notice back then. There was a brief hu-hu and then almost everyone forgot about it.
Back at the turn of the millennium, there were mass protests in Seattle as the WTO met there. Strangely, no one was protesting the WIPO meeting happening right across town in which they were pushing for the DMCA rip-off to make it an international treaty. When that failed, the US Legislature just made it apply to Americans.
Back in 1998, Disney pushed for, and got, the Copyright Extension Act, a bogus piece of legislation that essentially did what no law is supposed to do, changed the law in the middle of the game, to wit, it took existing copyrights that were about to expire – namely Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto – and gave Disney an extra 20-odd years on them. And you can expect that the same thing will happen when they are about to expire again. Corporations don’t die, so you can bet they aren’t ABOUT to let their ownership of properties expire unlike you worthless plebes.
The real problem is that IP law is utterly out of whack, it’s no longer functional, and people sense this. The whole thing needs to be overhauled utterly to make rewards somehow inherent in ownership/creation/release, and to remove all vestige of “control” over those creations, which cannot happen once it hits the Net.
20 years ago, John Perry Barlow wrote a fantastic Treatise on this for Wired Magazine:
The Economy Of Ideas
A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age.
(Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)
It’s still remarkably timely even 20 years later. And Barlow is not just some author bloviating an idea – as a member of the band The Grateful Dead, he put his money where his mouth is, and proved the validity of what he said by getting rich doing it.
It’s a long read but it’s well worth it. It’ll help you think about copyright and IP and the difficulties of rewards for it in an age where it’s all ephemeral bits and bytes, not objects to be interdicted.
And, if you’re paying ANY attention at all, you need to look into the TPP and see why it needs to be stomped on, and hard – it’s an effort to turn SOPA/PIPA once more into a reality by a different route – by creating treaty obligations quietly and under the table instead of passing messy, constituent-angering laws.
)