Pardon me, I've gotta take an I.P....

In her recent blog posting in which she weighs the pros and cons of willful disregard of copyright laws as presented in Fox's Glee ('Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club'), author and guest blogger Christina Mulligan concludes:

"Defenders of modern copyright law will argue Congress has struck “the right balance” between copyright holders’ interests and the public good. They’ll suggest the current law is an appropriate compromise among interest groups. But by claiming the law strikes “the right balance,” what they’re really saying is that the Glee kids deserve to be on the losing side of a lawsuit. Does that sound like the right balance to you?"

I'm sorry. Ed is not convinced. While it seems harsh to hold high school students, whose intent may only be to honor the creative genius of their cultural icons by adapting it, up to a lesser standard than the adult sector of the species, it strikes me as tantamount to suggesting that some laws apply to some more than others. Isn't that why we have Driver's Ed and a lengthy Permit Process?

As Ed noted in a recent rebuttal posted first at Brazen Careerist when one poster asked, "I tend to think that intellectual property and copyright laws have gone too far in this country, and are doomed to die in an internet age, eventually. But does that mean we should flaunt them until they are changed?":

Ed: Well,  if we flaunt intellectual property laws, then we are unconsciously or consciously suggesting that they are not on par with any other body of law. And I see this as a dangerous precedent. If tomorrow, simply because we're running late to the office, we decide to ignore STOP signs and red lights, the argument that in an age when motorists are willfully ignoring the ban on cell phone use while driving anyway seems hardly a defense for not bringing our vehicles to a full stop. The day we tap into the equivalent of 'moral relevance' as applied to law, is the day we might as well hang out the Anarchy flag and just do whatever the hell we all please. I.P. laws are at the foundation of protections for the core of our creative commerce. To ignore them is to cheapen the creative process itself. It's tantamount to saying: "Well, that's a great idea, but I would have come up with it anyway." Wrong. I, and presumably anyone in this forum, probably wouldn't have come up with Monet's 'Water Lillies,' Bach's 'Preludium in E,' or Dr. Robert Jarvik's artificial heart. If we could, then society wouldn't hold these achievements up to such high esteem. In short, every idea would become relatively equivalent. Might as well dump the Tonys, Oscars, Peabody's and the Olympics. Imagine that. Sound extreme? Not in a world where creative idea generation goes unprotected. The result: creativity is stripped of financial incentive. It becomes creativity for creativity's sake. Try buying a quart of milk or paying your rent by walking into your local grocery store or your landlord's office with a new song you wrote or poem. Without I.P. protection, creativity dies on the vine. My two cents. Oh, and I hereby wave my rights. Feel free to distribute at will.


I invite comment. Ed It.