Yesterday I came across this post by Mathew Ingram and flagged it as something of interest - but I wasn't entirely sure what to riff on. Then I cam across this from Doc Searls, and the two things clicked with me. First, there's Mathew on copyright and intellectual property - which he says is causing us to approach content from the wrong direction:

Because there'€™s no such thing as intellectual property in the same sense as we think about physical property. You can steal my car, or my wallet, and that deprives me of those things in a very real way, which is why doing so is a crime. But you can'€™t steal my idea any more than you can steal my thoughts. And in some cases, taking my idea and adding to it will actually make it better, which is why we have principles like "€œfair use"€ and "fair dealing". There's no such concept as "€œfair driving,"€ where you get equal access to my car

That idea resonated with me when I read Doc this morning:

the value I create isn't just for me. I see what I do here as a positive contribution to the world: open prose that's like open code: simply useful. Or, in other terms, NEA: something Nobody owns, Everybody can use and Anybody can improve.

Which in turn reminded me of things Jonathan Coulton said on last week's TwIT podcast - about why he puts his music out DRM free - he wants to see other people remix and reuse, becase he recognizes that ultimately, his fans will buy from him without having a gun put to their heads. Incidentally, I just paid Coulton for "Code Monkey:, even though I could have just grabbed it for free. The song came to my attention initially via YouTube buzz, which happened because people put together interesting videos that weren't yanked by a stupid record label. In my case, no video, no sale - the value that someone else added to the song led directly to the sale.

This is tied together by an interesting interactive "what happens after I post" graphic Doc pointed to. Many people look at this with horror; the rest of us just see it as the way things really work. At some point, copyright law is going to have to start lining up with that reality.

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