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05 Apr 2008 10:35 am

Digital Ownership

By Patrick
Charles C. Mann on copyright in the digital age:

Copyright should not impede artistic efforts to explain our times. Nor should we let it interfere with the relation between producers and consumers of art. Any work of art is a gift, at least in part -- something done not purely from motives of calculation. Knowing this, people approach works of art in a more receptive state than they do, say, advertisements. The same people who would unhesitatingly copy Microsoft Word at their jobs, the novelist Neal Stephenson said to me recently, "would no more bootleg a good novel than they would jump the turnstile at an art museum." Stephenson, the author of The Diamond Age, a witty, imaginative science-fiction novel about pirating an electronic book, and the forthcoming Cryptonomicon, believes that in the long run this relationship of respect and trust is the only safeguard that works of art have. It is also the reason they are worth safeguarding. What will the act of reading be like if every time I open a book I must negotiate the terms under which I read it?

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