A decade ago, a young entrepreneur got a ton of traffic selling something he didn't own.
Before you could say "but he didn't have the rights" he sold that site, Broadcast.Com, to Yahoo for over $6 billion in stock. Then he sold the stock after the Internet bubble doubled its value to over $13 billion.
The entrepreneur's name? Mark Cuban.
Well, Cuban's grown up now. He sees YouTube getting a ton of traffic, much of it from perfectly legitimate sources, and says it's worthless. "The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue," he told Reuters.
UPDATE: Apparently his undies are in a twist because Yahoo may wind up paying about one-quarter what his fake company got for YouTube.
Want to know what's even funnier?
Under the present copyright regime, anyone using content, even tangentially, can be sued to oblivion. Not just YouTube, but all of YouTube's users.
And all that creativity goes away.
The fact is that most of the raw material used in new creative products comes from old creative products. And the present U.S. copyright regime denies this reality. It places a veto not only on new creative work, but on technology as well.
And that's just wrong.
Why isn't the U.S. tech economy growing? Why is our creative economy no longer extending its lead against the rest of the world, but falling back?
It's copyright absolutism. It's copyright law that is so deeply flawed it makes illegal the very things it was designed to encourage.
The only purpose of copyright law -- or of patent law -- is to encourage the creation of more intellectual goods.
Our law has, for nearly a decade, done just the opposite. And, not coincidentally, we have been falling behind ever since that happened.
Let's get back to fair use. Let's get back to copyrights which expire. Let's only allow new inventions to be patented -- not math, not ways of doing business. And let's have enough patent people in place at the Patent Office so you can't sneak crap past them.
Reform now. Legalize Mark Cuban.
Recent Comments