Thursday, February 17, 2011
Creative Commons
I like the idea of Creative Commons. It allows a creator to say what protections they want for their creation using a tool that appears to be fairly easy to work with. I think that anyone posting a creation on the internet should have to sign up for a copyright license in a central place so that anyone wanting to use the creation can easily look up what the restrictions are. However, if a creator fails to sign up within a preset time frame, it should mean the sky's the limit. As I've said before, I think whole copyrighting/patenting thing is out of control. A good example of this is the Monsanto Company. I found an article about them in one of Kevin Kelly's news sites (a Bernie Sanders newsroom article no less: http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=c255ae23-f41a-470d-8460-a65d65df6f58) Monsanto actually sued a neighboring farmer when they tested some of the plants in his fields and found one of them was grown from a Monsanto seed. Monsanto's seeds are genetically-engineered, while the farmer was organic. He had no intention of using a Monsanto seed and had no idea one had blown in and was growing in his field. The system needs an overhaul to prevent frivolous court cases like this.
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Gail,
ReplyDeleteI had heard about the Monsanto lawsuit before and it is a great example of copyright laws gone bad. The poor farmer lost everything simply because one of the seeds from the Monsanto seed truck blew into his field, unbeknown to him. I searched around for articles on Monsanto lawsuits and it appears that there have actually been several lawsuits of this type, by Monsanto against farmers in North Dakota, West Virginia, and Tennessee. Such a large company trying to take advantage of smaller farmers, so sad. Nice post!
It is too bad the farmer couldn't sue Monsanto for contamination of his organic field with their seed as they are responsible to make sure it wasn't released on his private property without his permission.
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