This post is about a couple of things. First, it seems Cory Doctorow has issued DMCA takedown notice to the folks at BoringBoring.org for their parody of Doctorow’s BoingBoing. What nobody knew at the time is that Gakker has also been on the scene, Doing Doctorow parodies, and all. Which is where thing 2™ comes in: this post about bricks highlights an ongoing concern of mine. What is the real difference between a long-existing thing with a variety of uses, some of them illegal, and the thing not yet developed with a variety of uses, some of them illegal?
I’m asking a serious question there, but here’s Snory Hacktorow:
My call for sanity regarding the fair use of the brick
Bricks have many legitimate uses, including shelter, crowd dispersal, and brief grandstanding against Israeli tanks, so why all the focus on the very few which are heaved through shop windows to allow for the sharing of items? I paid for that brick, I’m not interested in being told what to do with it.
My 4:40 am shouty talk at my sock-covered fist on the Greyhound 234 westbound, transcribed for campus dissemination and worship.
Link (Thanks to Goonsnargle, the elf that lives in my hair and tells me which people are demons)
[update:] Yes, most of this was a April Fools trick, but sometimes jokes tell a truth that can’t be found elsewhere. That’s why I’m quoting the story five days later.
There were some things — bricks and tape recorders, for instance — that were developed in a time before lawsuits. Others, MP3s and iPods, were developed later. I cannot begin to understand the world which would make possession of the later a crime, while potentially lethal technologies — guns and bricks, perhaps — remain available with few limitations.
What arrangement of politics and legal precedent places so high a value on corporate profit?
Related: patent law is broken, and copyright is broken too and an all too possible fiction about the people who owned the Bible.