Waddling to the Courthouse
Intellectuals must love this time in history. Craftsmen, on the other hand, no doubt hate it.
A fairly significant copyright case from the 11th circuit came out last week, commonly referred to as “Greenburg II.” The legal analysis and significance is somewhat technical, and if you are interested you’re welcome to read an analysis at Law.com. From a slightly larger perspective, I think this case points up beautifully the difficulty we are having applying our thinking to new forms of technology. The case involved a basic question over whether the National Geographic Society had the right, under it’s existing copyright permissions, to reproduce its magazines on CD-ROM without having to seek new permissions from the photographers represented in the magazines. The question itself is simple, and the answer is simple if the reproduction had been in book form. But by putting the magazines on CD-ROM, and requiring software to manipulate the contents, many argue that the type of reproduction is technically different from a book form reproduction and therefore requires its own, separate analysis.
From the intellectual’s viewpoint, this is great fun and mentally stimulating. From the craftsman’s viewpoint (i.e., the magazine company) this is a headache of the first degree, as they don’t care how the little mice behind the scenes get the books pages in front of the people who want to look at it, they simply want to know what they have to do in order to release this CD-ROM.
I would venture to say that the average consumer, other than being dazzled by the ability to store so much great info in so little a space, also doesn’t care a thing about the mechanical/’technical difference between a book and a CD-ROM, they simply want to know how much the cool thing costs.
I know sometimes things that look like ducks can’t be allowed to continue doing so, but for the most part, if most people think it’s a duck, why not just let it go?
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