Commercial vs. Cultural: The way to Sensible Copyright Law
by T. Colin Dodd
It’s time to overhaul copyright law | Technology | guardian.co.uk
We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.
A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.
The drafting group - which is open to the general public - includes representatives of creators’ groups (tellingly, no one from the corporations that buy creators’ works have taken part), disabled rights groups, technical standards bodies, civil rights groups, even medical rights groups like Médecins Sans Frontières.
A2K is at the top of the WIPO agenda. It’s the first breath of sanity in the copyright debate. Let’s hope it’s not the last one.
