Why Current Intellectual Property Law is So Wrong-Headed

Jamie Boyle: Deconstructing Stupidity. It is as if we had signed an international stupidity pact, one that required us to ignore the evidence, to hand out new rights without asking for the simplest assessment of need. If the stakes were trivial, no one would care. But intellectual property (IP) is important. These are the ground rules of the information society. Mistakes hurt us. They have costs to free speech, competition, innovation, and science. Why are we making them?

This important essay asks, and begins to answer, the key question of why IP law has gone so wrong.

Boyle points out that there's money on the side of a less Draconian system than we have -- the technology industry dwarfs the entertainment cartel -- yet the law totally favors the entertainment side. The answers, he says, are complex and rife with mythology, pushed on all of us by the copyright interests, that skews the result.

Read it.