You’re Still More Likely To Get Hit By Lightning Than Convicted From Sharing Culture
Copyright Monopoly: In 2012, more than twice as many Swedes were hit by lightning as were indicted for sharing culture. This stands in stark contrast with the scare campaigns from the copyright industry. When confronted with facts, the copyright monopoly lobby’s fear campaigns to stop people from sharing freely come across as outlandish at best.
The tallies for last year are in. Ten people were charged in 2012 with violating the copyright monopoly from sharing culture freely, and all of them convicted (as we know that courts can’t be trusted in this field). Ten people out of four million sharing culture on an everyday basis, directly or indirectly.
The copyright industry likes to blow the horns and whistles loudly over each such conviction, cynically holding them up to the public as a dire example. Some people are understandably falling for this. But is a fear of the copyright industry… rational?
Phi Beta Iota: Academics and the public have been especially stupid in not demanding that ALL research and ALL publications funded by the tax-payer be free of copyright restrictions, or even better, the original individual human author(s) retain original copyright while the government gets unlimited unrestricted copyright within the government alone, and all others must comply with the authors Creative Commons copyright. Wikipedia lacks the integrity to make the jump to offering WikiJournals, but we pray that some publisher — Oxford, Routledge, any publisher — might recognize that there is profit to be made honorably by serving as an online broker for peer reviewed and validated information such that anyone can access the full text online free. Subscriptions are stupid for the simple reason that less than 2% of any given subscription access is relevant to any given researcher. Imagination has been lacking in this area, we look for some major break-out in the near term. It should be centered on the need to reconnect all of the disciplines, and inspire M4IS2 — Multinational, Multiagency (or Multilingual), Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making. Amazon would be a logical place to establish such a capability, but Amazon is still unwilling to think about content, only about packaging.
