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Sometime in the last couple of weeks, I stumbled across an interesting article about jokes and copyright (link points to Google cache, so it may expire...the page itself was deleted) over on The Patry Copyright Blog. Now, I am sad to say, it seems the blog has been shut down. :-(If you follow the link to the blog, he seems to have deleted all but the most current "shutdown" post, but, even there, he provides what I see as a valuable assessment of the current state of copyright law from someone who has been working in the for 26 or more years. (someone who is also knowledgeable enough to have been hired by Google...)
All that being said, and while trying to remain sensitive to his reasons for shutting it down, I have decided to post the following quote from his final post:
Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.
- William Patry - The Patry Copyright Blog
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