Clay Shirky: Defend our Freedom to Share or Why SOPA is a Bad Idea
What does a bill like SOPA mean to our shareable world? Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto, a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume.
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ABOUT Clay Shirky
“Clay Shirky’s work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralised technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development.
He believes that new technologies enabling loose collaboration and taking advantage of ‘spare’ brainpower will change the way society works. They are enabling new kinds of co-operative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere and as an alternative to centralised and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting.
In his writings and speeches he has argued that ‘a group is its own worst enemy’. His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC. Clay is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s Graduate Interactive Telecommunications Programme, where he teaches a course named ‘Social Weather’.
He’s the author of ‘Here Comes Everybody’, about the power of crowds, and the brand-new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.”
The VIDEO
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No loophole only revised law, specifically Directive 2011/77/EU. Clause 8 is clear, “The rights in the fixation of the performance should revert to the performer if a phonogram producer refrains from offering for sale in sufficient quantity, within the meaning of the International Convention on the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, copies of a phonogram which, but for the term extension, would be in the public domain, or refrains from making such a phonogram available to the public.”
It continues, “that option should be available on expiry of a reasonable period of time for the phonogram producer to carry out both of these acts of exploitation. The rights of the phonogram producer in the phonogram should therefore expire, in order to avoid a situation in which these rights would co-exist with those of the performer in the fixation of the performance while the latter rights are no longer transferred or assigned to the phonogram producer.”
Simply put, the unreleased Dylan tracks mean that if Sony hadn’t published them, their copyright term would end 50 years after their creation, and Dylan himself would be eligible to claim copyright. The issue (in my opinion) is NOT about attempting to stop the tracks entering the public domain, rather, it’s about ensuring that Sony will control the unreleased tracks in the future. The real issue is about control.