A Follow-Up to "The Web is Public Domain"

It's similar to development and development management. They require different skills - being a good developer doesn't mean you'll be a good development manager and vice versa.

Similarly being a journalist (which is about research and writing) is very different to being an editor (which is about organisation and the commercial side of things).

That said, her level of knowledge seems insufficient for either role. The basics of copyright law would seem to be a pre-requisite for anything involving writing these days.

MP3s are different, they're covered by a specific law (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) created at the behest of the record companies and it wouldn't apply here.

While there may be some elements of criminal law that might apply, in all probability this would have been a straight civil case rather than a criminal matter with the writers claiming damages for the work published without permission. She could have accepted liability (or even not done so), paid them (which would likely have been relatively limited given the pieces she's used - it's not like she's been grabbing major scoops from the NYT) and moved on.

The chances are that the writers would be no more interested in racking up legal bills that she would so costs there would have been minimal. Basically she gives each one of them a few hundred dollars, they give her a letter saying it's OK to run the piece.

She was in the wrong but the punishment (essentially being forced out of business) doesn't really fit the "crime" and the legal remedies would have been far easier on her than the mob was.

There sure is a disconnect going on between how big corporations utilize copyright to their advantage and how regular folks deal with it, rather hamfistedly, as in this case.

I disagree with your earlier statement that this might be a new way in which the public "thinks about copyright", it is rather the new way in which it is /misunderstood/. So I'd say we shouldn't confuse the mounting ignorance in the general populace (which is, mostly, attributable to just the sheer amount of stuff that is out there - logic usually fails when something gets too big to follow) with an actual shift in consciousness. There is a need to rethink a lot of this, but that shouldn't be about "how do we break the old thing", but about "how do we create a new thing" - and that is where efforts like CC come into play.

So I don't really disagree that this is a widespread phenomenon, I'm just saying that it will not be where the change comes from in the future. That is, of course, unless reality is particularly cruel to us.

No. There is a difference between pirating for personal use or even sharing with others and re-publishing content for profit.

Copyright survives precisely because it is not enforced 100% - if it was followed by the letter, everybody would very soon see that it's not a good idea, crippling culture and turning the participation in public discourse on its head. This is also why there are rules like Fair Use - to acknowledge that there is an area where copyright is just not producing any net worth for society.

That said, you cannot then go on and follow that because it is rarely followed to the letter by regular people, the whole system isn't working. I see the recent "liberal" approach to cultural content as a plain opposite and equal reaction to the decades of capitalizing on culture. The media industry had their way for a good while and very nearly fully commercialized it (which is why, even today, you see people arguing that artists wouldn't produce art if they weren't paid for it) and now that the sole purpose of their existence (distribution of cultural content) is done better, cheaper and more efficient by regular people do they circle around themselves eating their own young.

I see the Cooks Source incident as a very weird example of a regular person behaving as entitled as the big media corporations do (or compare, for instance, the various Timbaland "situations" we've had over the years) - she is not in a position where she can act like that, but others clearly CAN.

These are all symptoms of a change that is clearly happening, but the outcome will not consist of those symptoms. Or at least I hope that it does not.

Her problem isn't that she messed up. Her problem is that she doesn't understand her own business. If she had a long history of honest publishing and the story was that she had two browser windows open, one with a Creative Commons licensed article and one with an unlicensed article, and simply copied from the wrong window, that would be messing up. Not even knowing that copyright is the default state of a written work is not messing up. It's utter ignorance of a fundamental rule in the business of publishing.

You can't make something like that go away. No amount of apology is going to change the fact that you don't have the requisite knowledge to be in the publishing business. The only correct response is to go back to the drawing board and learn your shit before you come back to work.