Down in liberal Chapel Hill, they’re holding the Triangle Bloggers Conference 2005. I live in Northern Virginia, but may Greyhound it to the University of North Carolina for the Saturday seminars if there’s enough interest in copyright and the poor–especially in a blogging context. Chapel Hill residents were pioneers in the civil rights movement, the topic of the copyright-menaced Eyes on the Prize. During the Great Depression, the University’s Howard Odum distinguished himself for his concern for the poor. Wouldn’t it behoove the bloggers, academics and nonacademics alike, to update fine Tar Heel traditions?
About wealth, blogging and copyright, the big questions are obvious. Do we really want low-income people to be deprived of information they need to participate intelligently in civic dialogue online, especially if more newspapers decide to hide their content behind pay-per-read and subscription walls? What about the future risks to the community blogging movement in small North Carolina towns and others with chain-owned monopoly newspapers? If nothing else, take a look at music download pattterns, as documented by a Pew study, and then extrapolate from there.
Turns out that low-income folks already on the Net have much more of a penchant for downloading music illegally than well-off surfers do. Are the poor less moral than the rich? Hardly. Music, however, is like sex; one way or another people are going to get it. Any wonder that a 12-year-old honor student in a New York housing project was among the targets of the RIAA nasties?
No, I don’t believe in piracy, and as much as I disagree with the current laws, I believe that corporations, millionaire rock stars and copyright heirs should be paid every penny they are now entitled to collect. But isn’t it time for more realistic and more balanced intellectual property laws?
John Edwards and the blogger activists
Shouldn’t the bloggers care? And how about UNC’s multimillionaire Professor-to-Be, John Edwards? One way to begin would for activist bloggers to encourage Edwards to work toward the elimination or mitigation of the evil twins of copyright–the DMCA (which won’t even allow backups of legally bought material for personal use if one must bypass encryption) and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (which deprived today’s schoolchildren of access to such modern classics as The Great Gatsby).
It is also important that we not allow the DMCA to be used in an anti-competitive way by allowing the anti-circumvention clauses to reduce competition. Given the changing complexion of the Supreme Court and the increasing conservative climate in the judiciary, this last matter is especially urgent despite some hope in the courts. Otherwise the cost to consumers, including the poor, could be well into the tens of billions or even more. Time for the bloggers to encourage Professor Two Americas to give a squat? If nothing else, his UNC-branded Poverty Center should foster blogging among the poor and fight copyright laws that jack up the price of information while rewarding corporations and heirs far more than actual creators. Wouldn’t this be one way to distinguish it from the existing Odum Institute for Research in the Social Sciences?
World’s leading experts on poverty: The poor
The ballyhoo about the new Edwards center says it will bring together UNC professors “and other national public policy experts to examine innovative and practical ideas for moving more Americans out of poverty and into the middle class. The center will have an advisory committee of senior faculty representing multiple disciplines across campus.”
Um, couldn’t the the Edwards center also reach out to some better-informed experts about poverty–notably the poor themselves? Mightn’t the Net, including carefully nurtured blogging, be one way for this to happen? What’s more, through personal use of blogging, not merely through aides, Edwards just might be able to educate himself about the threat of Draconian copyright laws to blogging and other grassroots media that can speak up for the poor.
Update, 11:39–before I forget: Thanks to Ed Cone, both a blogger and a Greensboro News-Record columnist, for a blog item pointing to a TeleRead post mentioning John Edwards, copyright and the bloggers’ conference (number of reader comments so far in response his post: zero–and not Ed’s fault). In warning about future risks, I don’t mean to reflect on the more community-minded journalists and newspapers such as Greensboro’s. Besides, what about the future if the paper’s management changes and the people aren’t as aware of community needs? Bad copyright law inreases the risks of media someday going after bloggers in a major way.
Meanwhile, speaking of the blog-related positives in the newspaper world, Prof. Two Americas would do well to check out the blog-based dialog that News-Record Editor John Robinson has with his wired readers. An example for Edwards to follow personally–right now, before the poverty center is well underway? Predictable blogs written by staffers don’t count. I want the blog and the words to be truly Edwards’s own.
