Copyright

So what should be done regarding copyright and the Internet?
In Cory Doctorow's piece Lockdown, we see the birth of the Internet economy. Where the government "assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information." This didn't work out as planned because you would have to find a way to control the way people used their computers, and what files they transferred. When thought about, this idea seemed to just create more and more problems. The solution in 1996 was the WIPO Copyright Treaty. The treaty made it illegal to basically figure out the secrets behind unlocking programs and extracting media, but that inevitably failed and only make copying that much easier. Doctorow explains that in deciding if a law is going to fit a purpose it must go through two tests- whether it will work and whether or not it will have effects on everything else. He uses an example of not being able to regulate something as simple as the wheel because bank robbers escape in cars which are wheeled vehicles. You can't do this because after performing the two tests stated above, there is now way to make a wheel that is useful for the public, yet useless for bank robbers. However, if the same test was used to show the negativity of hands free phones in cars, you could have something there because you are not changing the design of the car- it's still a car at the end of the day, just without a hands free phone inside. Unfortunately, this cannot work for the Internet. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Shutting down a website from the net doesn't change anything. The best part of this piece was when Doctorow goes on to discuss SOPA, and how the government was "ready to break the Internet on a fundamental level- all in the name of presevering Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies." He indicates that a general computer that only runs programs that don't "scare" or "upset" the government can't exist, and that we must win the copyright war somehow, before we can move forward.
In James Boyle's The Public Domain, he discusses what he calls "The Internet Threat." He implies that the effortless copying that can be done on the Internet poses a threat to culture production. He thinks there should be more property rights, harsher penalties for infringements, and more protection for those infringements. He calls for a regulation on technology so that the supposed war on copyright can come to an end. To be frank, I found his chapter on the topic rather harsh and hard to follow. After he discussed law after law after endless law, I got the gist. He goes on to discuss what can be done to give intellectual property the same rights at materialistic and tangible property. This makes me think of a class discussion we had regarding intellectual property and Facebook. If i wanted to, if I thought I had a great enough facebook status, I could copyright it. But does that mean that someone can't just copy and paste what I've said and make it their status? Sure, maybe they can't legally quote it and sell it on T-shirts and coffee mugs, but they can still take the idea. So at the end of the day, it really seems so out of reach to be able to have restrictions on anything on the web at this point in the game, as there is just too much information out there.