Do You Copy?by
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Michael Swaine is editor-at-large of Dr. Dobb's Journal (http://www.ddj.com). He has graciously granted permission for Preserve Staff Now! to display the following essay which originally appeared in the journal's monthly column "Swaine's Flames", November 2002. Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. Theft is. Or rather, copying. Because copying is usually not theft, and not necessarily bad even when it is, it needs to be stated loud and clear in these loud and unclear times: Copying is a Good Thing. Children acquire the norms of their societal group by copying. Student artists learn to paint by copying the masters. Composers ring the changes on motifs and techniques invented by others. New genres of music are arising based on copying and recombining pieces of others' work. Software developers advance the state of their art by copying and enhancing other developers' algorithms and code. A primary goal of software engineering is code reuse. Software patterns codify practices for others to copy. In engineering, copying gives us standards, predictable behavior, interchangeable parts, and the Industrial Revolution. In science, it's not a discovery until someone has copied your procedure down to the last detail and attained the same results. Copying is essential to innovation. Intellectual property laws arose to place very limited constraints on copying to achieve certain limited societal benefits. The idea was to make sure that there were financial rewards to innovation. The idea was not to stifle innovation. Over the years, my work has been copied without my express permission, although not necessarily without my tacit approval, by fellow students unwilling to do their own homework; magazine subscribers wanting an archival version of a column; readers wanting to share an idea with friends or colleagues; scholars and teachers and seminar leaders wanting to use the work for classes; librarians and library patrons; compilers of web sites devoted to quotations; computer historians; third-world scholars short on funds; lawyers trying to build a case, not necessarily against me; those people who e-mail 50 of their closest friends twice a week with their latest discovery; those who do the same via fax; book authors facing tight deadlines; researchers who hate doing research; Open Source-minded HyperTalk programmers; folks just trying to find something to liven up the cubicle walls; former writing teachers hungry for examples, good or bad, for future writing classes; advertising copywriters; promoters of causes; fans, critics, reviewers, friends, foes, and indulgent family members. Not once in the 20 years that I have been making a living from writing did I think that the protection of my intellectual property rights justified outlawing photocopy machines or scanners. The crowned heads of Hollywood, though, would like to outlaw any drive, format, or algorithm -- any mechanism of any sort -- that can be used to commit intellectual property crime against them. And they consider any copying, even copying that has always been legal, to be a crime against them. Corrupt and stupid politicians are giving them much of what they want, but they want even more. There is an extremely powerful (and well armed) group that has fought for years against the idea that the mechanism should be blamed for the crime committed with it. Wouldn't it be cinematic to see the NRA take on the MPAA? Like King Kong versus Godzilla: the apes against the dinosaurs. (Now, now: I connect the NRA with apes only because of Charleton Heston and the Planet of the Apes link, and if you insist that Godzilla wasn't a dinosaur, I guess "lizards" would suit Jack Valente and his pals equally well.) Law professor and open-source advocate Lawrence Lessig said it all much more succinctly: "Creativity and innovation always build on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society" (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html). The most amazing thing is that the media maggots -- er, magnates -- no, I had it right the first time -- intend to use programmers and engineers as the pawns in their game of stripping away the right to copy. Because they want to do more than make copying illegal. They want to make it impossible. The social cost of what they intend will be huge, and their motives are pure greed. But they need your help to succeed -- and they expect to get it. They intend to use the most innovative people in our society to crush innovation. Are you going to let them get away with it? # # # |