Comment Copyright, Fair Use, the true intentions of it all (Score 1) 290
There is never anything wrong with wanting recognition for work done. It is your right, and you should demand it. Never should anyone ever stand for someone else getting credit for their hard work. That said, I can be completely honest when I say that I am afraid of the future. I am afraid of the future that holds a regard to copyright and fair use as it does in this situation. Was all of this really necessary? Was standing on a soap box and enlisting the army of the internet to troll this poor individual to oblivion, simply because you didn't get credit for your recipe? At which point does the matter go beyond being the right thing to do, to becoming pretentious or downright anal?
In grade school, I wrote a paper on a famous person. I couldn't quite come up with enough fluff to meet the overall requirements set forth by the teacher, so I lifted a paragraph from one of he sources, reworded it and turned it in without the citations. Ultimately, I ended up still getting knocked a few points for plagiarism. I complained, as any rebellious lazy teenager would have for getting points knocked off for what felt like impeccable work on my part to conceal the evidence. The point of the exercise went way over my head, as ultimately it meant nothing to me; I did not identify with the matter, and therefore it lacked any importance to me. As I've grown older though, I've come to understand what my English teachers were attempting to ultimately educate us on.
Many years on, reflecting on those lessons when reading this article, I feel as though perhaps they are teaching the wrong concept in school - or, maybe my understanding of the entire point of these protections is, for the post part, wrong. Today, it seems that a concept that has been around for 300 some odd years now, has within the last 10 years found itself skyrocketed into the poster child of public trolling existing today.
While it has been pointed out that the Cooks Source magazine has copied from many sources, I have to question the ultimate result of this overall situation. The magazine provided some pretty obvious services, none of which appeared in the least to be monetary for the proprietor. In raising the villagers, pitchforks in hands, the delivery of recipes and generally educational concepts to the probably desperately small group of frequent readers has now ceased. Granted, there is no shortage of recipe collections, however, it is reasonable to assume that there were at least a few individuals who enjoyed the material presented to them in Cooks Source.
This precedent scares the hell out of me. With the internet as its engine, bloggers as the fuel, and an impatient spark to top it all off, we now see the full power of copyright at hand. Copyright has now trolled an entire magazine out of business. This situation holds no difference to the situations that the RIAA and MPAA have placed upon the web in the form of patronizing and mass-suing for infringement of the same rights that the original author complained for.
The interesting thing of it all, is that we dwellers of the internet have our methods of trolling, be it 4chan or mass-traffic events caused through the slashdot effect, we have an innate ability to source the crowd as a whole and, whether it drives our opinion(s) forward or not, drive incredible amounts of traffic towards it to grant a distinct sense of popularity and substantiation to them.
On the other hand, groups like the RIAA, MPAA, and even the individuals like the original author here, have and utilize the exact same tools, although they have one additional tool that we do not. These doctrines like Copyright and Fair Use, all exist as physical manifestations in our real world. They are real - far more real than any conceivable publicity stunt we could perform through a DDoS or well written article.
As incidents like this occur, what stops someone from claiming fair use and copyright infringement on more important works? What happens when suddenly an object you use every day becomes an illegal work, because it violated a copyright? These sorts of events are already precipitating in the cell phone wars as patent suits continue growing, but patent suits are nothing new.
I don't like this, I don't like this one bit. I feel as though this has gone from protecting the rights of the creator, the rights of the author... to preventing the use, preventing the benefit of the creation. Why write a recipe, if you don't want others to see it? Why write an educational paper, if it can't be used to educate? Why draw a picture, for no one to see?