I feel uneasy about the sense that the music industries appear on the side of right here. And this is a situation where we should hesitate to call things wrong simply because they are illegal.
We must remember that copyright is only justified on practical grounds, and with the internet these practicalities have changed greatly. If we only want to lecture 'kids on the internet' of how copyright was, we are failing to give the matter the thought it now needs. Copying, in itself, is good -- it is one of the two sides of the trade-off, and that the internet enables and encourages people to copy is a substantial good that we don't want to impede.
I think we should want attribution, but permission I feel less certain about. It is probably corporations that muddy the waters: people do plenty of open-source and share freely, and so retaining a little control seems socially reasonable. But corporations are all too often obnoxious sociopaths about copyright.
So I am not sure what I would tell 'kids on the internet'. I lean toward the share-everything-freely side, but it doesn't really matter anyway because the whole system is going to be doing a lot of evolving and adapting by itself in coming years.
The recorded music industry are not in the right here. The law is on their side, but they are trying to swim against an overwhelming tide.
I have a little more sympathy for the author of the plagiarised code. Whatever "copyright" system emerges from the Internet storm, it's not going to enable the RIAA to make money, but it might protect guys like that from having attributions removed from their work. I hope so.
We must remember that copyright is only justified on practical grounds, and with the internet these practicalities have changed greatly. If we only want to lecture 'kids on the internet' of how copyright was, we are failing to give the matter the thought it now needs. Copying, in itself, is good -- it is one of the two sides of the trade-off, and that the internet enables and encourages people to copy is a substantial good that we don't want to impede.
I think we should want attribution, but permission I feel less certain about. It is probably corporations that muddy the waters: people do plenty of open-source and share freely, and so retaining a little control seems socially reasonable. But corporations are all too often obnoxious sociopaths about copyright.
So I am not sure what I would tell 'kids on the internet'. I lean toward the share-everything-freely side, but it doesn't really matter anyway because the whole system is going to be doing a lot of evolving and adapting by itself in coming years.