LXer: Houston, We Have A -- Copyright -- Problem
 

Published at LXer:

Parker Higgins has a troubling story over at Medium about how he received a bogus copyright takedown on a recording of the famous "Houston, we have a problem" audio snippet from the Apollo 13 mission, which Higgins had uploaded to his Soundcloud page. As Higgins notes, the audio is clearly, without any doubt, in the public domain and free from any and all copyright restrictions -- yet it was still taken down. This is particularly stupid on a variety of levels...Perhaps more annoying, as Higgins notes, is that the reasons that Soundcloud gives for disputing the takedown... don't apply in this situation, because they all assume copyright... As Higgins notes this shows the rather nasty assumptions of "permission" culture that everything must have a copyright and everything must be licensed:

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Good read, full story here.

We have now entered deeply into what will appear to future historians as a modern dark age. There will be no culture, no knowledge, nothing of value or interest passed down to succeeding generations. No records or books stored in the attic. No ability to replay or recover DRM'd media, if it even exists. And no free access to copyrighted or patented material hoarded by the practitioners of legalalized greed that belonged to the common heritage of previous generations.

It is not about the stupid application of copyright law, or egregious excesses - it is the very existence of the concept of intellectual property in polite society that is the problem.

The very concept of intellectual property, that one person may own an idea, thought, sound or pattern of any kind, to the exclusion of others is an absurdity that must be abolished if the human species is to progress... or even survive.