In a NY Times article (also linked off of /.), the Committee for Economic Development has some interesting comments on copyright policy.
"The ideas of copy-left, or of a more liberal regime of copyright, are receiving wider and wider support," said Debora L. Spar, a professor at Harvard Business School. "It's no longer a wacky idea cloistered in the ivory tower; it's become a more mainstream idea that we need a different kind of copyright regime to support the wide range of activities in cyberspace."Nice to see this being talked about in the US mainstream press.
I note that one of the authors of the report is Susan Crawford, who gave what was for me a turning-point talk on Law and Identity at the State of Play conference in November; it was during her presentation that I realised that hey, these lawyers are not only talking about the issues, but some of them actually understand them and draw the right (from my point of view) conclusions. It was a huge relief!
I'm not surprised, therefore, to find that many of my worries about badly-applied IP laws seem to be addressed in this report. Let's just hope it's as influential as the NY Times supposes it will be.
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Mar 01, 2004 at 13:02