I've been reading about Nationalism, Empire, and Monarchy and how by the 17th century there was a growth of a middle class in many societies. I was curious about the "enclosure movement" of this time and I decided to learn more about it. I found an article titled "The Enclosure Movement in France" by Alek A. Rozental (the link only gives the first page) through BYU's library searches. I don't know how to link the full article since I accessed it through the library. The article gave a great history of this enclosure movement and described arguments both supporting and fighting this movement at the time. The enclosure movement was basically a shift from common farming and pasture ground, to "enclosed" properties owned my more middle class families. This led to many people moving into cities, giving strength to industries and forcing a shift into a new paradigm.
This blog I found compares this movement to what is happening today with copyrights and public material available online. He gives a good argument that copyrights shouldn't necessarily be done away with, but that we should limit them and charge a small fee for them. Professor Zappala and Eric S. Raymond (great audio file) have opened my mind to the idea of how beneficial open software could be, while I can see there is still a good argument for the other side. How much will things change in the future? Do you think that taking away copyrights would work?
Well, while I support open software and the open movement. There ought to be a balance.
ReplyDeleteThink for a moment if anyone was allowed to go in and change the Sistine Chapel mural... Perhaps to make it better (not just refresh the peeling pant), perhaps to actually improve it. What if afterward we all went "Wow" I can't believe how much better it is. We would still loose the original and the meaning of the original... It would be gone forever.
There needs to be controls and boundaries - specifically in creative areas, areas of fiction, and areas of religion. But that doesn't mean that there needs to be "copyright" laws the way we have them now.
I'd love to go and change the ending of "Where the Red Fern Grows" - update it so that I don't cry. But never at the expense of loosing the original thing.
First of all, I want to say that I really enjoyed reading Shaun's post. I hadn't thought of things in that way.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the battle lies between the preservation of individual value (the value of uniqueness) and the achievement of perfection by way of collaborating among the masses. I believe that the answer lies in having places for both to be done, where there is a central pool of knowledge that everyone can contribute to, while there is also a maintained respect for the preservation of an individual's works.
Just to add to the opposite side of the argument, though, I thought I would provide some theoretical food for thought. Who defines ownership, anyway? Native Americans, upon the arrival of European explorers, were startled at the European's conception of property and ownership of land. It must have been interesting for them to see their free and untamed land being divided into squares of individual plots for settlement.
In the end of life, as our culture's philosophy goes, we won't own anything but ourselves and who we have become. So, ownership and property rights can be thought of simply as means of organization, where stuff is divided up so that smaller parts are more efficiently dealt with. Eventually, we may have to face a reality where we no longer "own" anything, and where truth is more important than the individual. I mean, what if the Sistine Chapel were to disappear entirely? That is a crazy thought and it makes me shutter to think it. There really wouldn't be anything we could do about it, though. We would just have to move on. Was it really necessary in the first place? Why do we place so much value on it?
While I don't agree that our current culture of maintaining property rights should be done away with, if at least not at the present time, I think it is a good thing for us to think about the nature of individual ownership rights as we are trying to figure out how to be more effective problem-solvers.