As usual, I’m concerned about copyright and intellectual property.

As you can imagine, I’m on the side of Electronic Frontier Foundation, Open Media and lots of individuals who are presenting testimony to the American courts, and also campaigning against the undemocratic trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific trade treaties that will curb intellectual rights if the industry moguls in conjunction with some politicians have their way.

Open Media have started a way to get all of us participating in discussion of the issues and this is a crowd-sourcing tool to enable you to have your say. This link is my URL for sharing but if you join in you get your own to pass on to your friends.

https://openmedia.org/r/258683

If anyone is interested in the matter but doesn’t know where to start reading I can give you links to various articles that will give you some ideas. I hope some of you are already interested and will click on the link!

All of us benefit from the historical sharing of intellectual property – the very recent changes in copyright and patent law benefit the industrial giants but not always the creators of content. Under present restrictions and those that the proponents of new laws would like to impose we would never have had much of Shakespeare’s work, a great deal of classical art and music, or a lot of highly regarded novels. Transformative works benefit society as a whole and contribute to cultural growth. There need to be systems in place to ensure that creators are rewarded but the current crop of laws have very little to do with that.

It took this issue – very dear to my heart – to drag me out of a kind of mid-winte lethargy fuelled partly by illness over Christmas and New Year and partly, perhaps, by the weather… I shall now make an end-of-January resolution to post more often!