Jun 17, 2008

Creativity Strangled by the Law

With TED was love at first sight. We met online and just one video got me totally into him... well, it. TED is not a guy but a website, where you can find pretty good "talks" about multiple issues. Not ALL their speakers are great, but most of them are.

Today I want to share the view of a lawyer on the issue of copyrights and how when the law is written or applied without common sense it may end up trying to stop the unstoppable, criminalizing or driving underground things that shouldn't be penalized, like creativity.



Sadly, lately we have seen more and more how corporations try to manipulate the law in -what they believe- is their own benefit.

Just yesterday I blogged about Deutsche Telekom threatening other companies for using the color magenta in their logos. Today, I found out that Tastespotting, one of my favorites sites related to food is closed "due to legal complications", and even I was threatened with legal actions (without any legal base in my case) just for reporting something I saw in another website.

Now, why do I say "in what they believe is their own benefit?". Because in a good number of cases, the only thing those groups or companies are doing is just damaging their brand. In these days news run pretty quickly and a wider backlash from what I call "consumers with common sense" can be set up really fast.

Still, is it pretty clear that we need more lawmakers like Larry Lessig -with real knowledge about new technologies and less "embedded" with the big corporations-, to get better policies when it comes to copyrights.

The same way I believe that politically correctness can hinder creativity, outdated and one sided laws will always impact creativity in a negative way.

As a lawyer's daughter, I do understand that the law should be there to protect basic rights but laws without common sense can be more dangerous than any weapons of mass destruction!

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