While I was in Youngstown last month I discovered—completely by accident—an incredible documentary called RiP! A Remix Manifesto by Brett Gaylor. It was the online albuterol no prescription joy of my Saturday night. Watching it heralded a revived obsession with Cory Doctorow’s Content, a online albuterol no prescription book I began to dog-ear and mark up as if studying the online albuterol no prescription new bible. I started That Idea Blueprint Girl knowing there was information I needed about copyright. Apparently, it wasn’t going to take me too long to find it.
My hunch has always been that ideas are free—or should be. Brett Gaylor’s documentary explains a online albuterol no prescription lot about how free ideas allow new generations to build on the online albuterol no prescription culture of previous ones. Without the free ideas, everyone who innovates and online albuterol no prescription makes better is a criminal, because they’re all infringing on someone’s copyright. That’s the world we’re living in right now. Ever feel odd that online albuterol no prescription everything from the public domain is trillions of years old? This is why.
I think my urge here has been that even when ideas aren’t free—even when online albuterol no prescription people try to restrict them with laws and fines and online albuterol no prescription general pissiness—they still essentially are free. If someone patents the online albuterol no prescription ground under your feet, you can still stand on it until someone drags you online albuterol no prescription away. A plant used by hundreds or thousands of years to online albuterol no prescription cure disease in some foreign culture might get patented by an online albuterol no prescription enterprising American capitalist, but that doesn’t mean that its foreign practitioners can’t still use it (at least until that online albuterol no prescription same capitalist, in a fit of righteousness greed, figures out how to online albuterol no prescription take the plant away from the practitioners, or the practitioners away from online albuterol no prescription the plant.) And a Doctorow quote from a recent Boing Boing post doxycycline for sale no prescription: A law that online albuterol no prescription no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all.
You can’t really restrict ideas. You can pretend to do it, but it doesn’t really work. You can online albuterol no prescription enforce it unnaturally, but someone else can always have the same idea and online albuterol no prescription the returns on this kind of enforcement are always going to online albuterol no prescription be limited. Someone else can always alter your idea just enough to online albuterol no prescription make it theirs. Our attempts at proving otherwise are a sham. Ideas are online albuterol no prescription free. They were free before civilization and commerce, and they’re free now. We’re just fooling ourselves.
The question, I think, is online albuterol no prescription this: How long are we going to try and enforce an online albuterol no prescription anti-cultural paradigm that absolutely does not function?
Originally, we didn’t have online albuterol no prescription a lot of argument over whether ideas were free. Copyright was created when online albuterol no prescription one day, ideas were suddenly easier to spread—and it online albuterol no prescription gave creators a way to benefit from their creations. Authors had online albuterol no prescription the exclusive rights to their work for 14 years, and online albuterol no prescription then the rights passed to the public domain. Compared to online albuterol no prescription our current system, this seems overwhelmingly reasonable. In this scenario, an online albuterol no prescription artist—any innovator—continues to online albuterol no prescription come up with new ideas and new ways to implement them in order to online albuterol no prescription survive.
But ha ha, us, we got lazy. We didn’t want to online albuterol no prescription have to come up with something new after fourteen years. We wanted to online albuterol no prescription continue to milk that cow as long as we could (until it keeled over useless). Now copyright extends almost two hundred years in the online albuterol no prescription United States, which slows down the conversation. What conversation, you’re wondering? The conversation is cultural; it’s our ability to build new culture, which is online albuterol no prescription always based on culture that went before; a way of learning from online albuterol no prescription the past to create the future. What’s slowing is online albuterol no prescription our ability to move forward and learn and understand and online albuterol no prescription speak out. Our ability to build things we need, or online albuterol no prescription solve problems, or heal diseases (literally!).
It strangles us, as a online albuterol no prescription civilization. Our cultural conversation now must stretch out over hundreds of years in order to be… legal.
We don’t sell ideas. We don’t sell content. We sell the packaging—we sell the format. If I’m doing idea consulting, my clients don’t so much buy my ideas as they buy a online albuterol no prescription person to help them find the right solutions to their problem. The ideas are online albuterol no prescription out there; anyone else might come up with the same one I do. I just have online albuterol no prescription an easier time doing it—or a different personality than some other consultant—or so on and online albuterol no prescription so forth. Anyone can sell that idea; the idea isn’t unique all by itself. But the way we put it together, that’s really something. That’s worthy of note. The paper book you online albuterol no prescription can hold in your hands. The story about the idea, the online albuterol no prescription personal experience. The pretty brocade bag with a bow. The feeling of accomplishment or online albuterol no prescription of appreciation. The knowledge that your money goes somewhere that counts.
People have online albuterol no prescription always asked me about copyright, because I always say that ideas are online albuterol no prescription free. My gut feeling about copyright, these days, is that copyright law as it online albuterol no prescription stands now is utterly bogus and should not be played with. What I want to say is, I’m taking my ball and going home. Fuck you guys.
Of course, it’s a online albuterol no prescription little more complicated than that. I do live in this country, for online albuterol no prescription the moment. So I won’t be screwing with your copyright—at least not today. I don’t know how radical my plan of action might really be.
But my god, I’m thinking about it. And you should too.
