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Why internet scholars hate copyright
Jonathan Zittrain, The Copyright Cuffs, CIO Magazine, October 15, 2003. Zittrain answers the question: Why do law professors specializing in internet law tend to hate copyright? Excerpt: "Without decrying the concept of taxation, every tax professor I've met regards the U.S. tax code with a kind of benign contempt, explaining it more often as a product of diverse interests shaped from the bottom up than as an elegant set of rules crafted by legal artisans to align with high-level principles about the most just way to redistribute resources or to maximize social welfare. Copyright is like that too, and while I hate its Platonic form no more than the typical tax maven hates tax, I find myself struggling to maintain the benign part of my contempt for its ever-expanding 21st-century American incarnation....The cost of making no change at all must also be soberly assessed, all the more so because the Internet heralds such a staggering potential for the rapid transformation and evolution of ideas. This is not about the crass ripping-off of CD tracks but about a possible Jazz Age of creation enabled by technology."
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