Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite advocates for fair use and reform of copyright law, explains Why I Copyfight.
He contends that without a major overhaul of the intellectual property system nothing less than culture is at stake.
There’s a word for all the stuff we do with creative works – all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture.
Culture’s old. It’s older than copyright.
The existence of culture is why copyright is valuable. The fact that we have a bottomless appetite for songs to sing together, for stories to share, for art to see and add to our visual vocabulary is the reason that people will pay money for these things.
Let me say that again: the reason copyright exists is because culture creates a market for creative works. If there was no market for creative works, there’d be no reason to care about copyright.
Read the whole article for Cory’s interesting background on the issue and his always compelling argument for why we should all be copyfighters.