Copyright is always government intervention
Like the acknowledgement of copyright as censorship on the Google Policy Blog a few months ago, William Patry’s Copyright is always Government Intervention is too nice to pass up, though Patry is only criticizing copyright maximalists’ selective accusation of government intervention and the Google Policy Blog said that copyright is a justifiable reason for censorship.
Speaking of copyright as a tool for censorship, Techdirt points out that the Russian government is cracking down on software piracy — by dissidents.
December 1st, 2007 at 17:39
[...] it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be [...]
December 22nd, 2007 at 16:20
[...] in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 20:40
[...] Copyright is and enables censorship. Lack of copyright enforcement enables free speech. Philip J. Cunningham writes: I was browsing for DVDs on a cold winter afternoon in one of Beijing’s finer bootleg shops when I came upon three boxed sets of DVDs critical of communism. One of the pirated sets, produced by Turkish presenter Harun Yahya, promised to detail the horrors of communism from an Islamic perspective, another by an American producer chronicled the uncomfortably bloody rise of modern China and the third contained Tiananmen footage from BBC TV News. Presumably the DVD pirates were in it for the money, but were they also unwittingly making China a freer place? [...]
January 26th, 2008 at 16:08
[...] In one recent item cited on Slashdot, a copyright claim is being used to attempt to censor Wikileaks. How unsurprising. [...]
July 20th, 2008 at 16:50
[...] instead of ‘copyright restriction’ (19,300 Google hits) is a peeve of mine and seeing copyright equated with censorship a small [...]