As the new year dawns, I am considering…digital rights management.

Ok, so I admit that’s a little strange, but it’s the way it is. Over the past year, and indeed the past five or six years, the “owners” of that nebulous thing referred to as “intellectual property” have started a massive assault on us, and the Constitution, with the goal of gaining complete control over where, when, if, and how you read/listen/watch any of these “creative” works. And we just lay there and take it.

A lot of quotes there, I admit. But with good reason - the framers of the Constitution went way out of their way to differentiate “intellectual property” from “real” properly. They basically set things up so that “creative works” were owned by society, not the creator…they also allowed the creator, for a limited time (to be decided by Congress, which is where all the trouble started) to solely profit from said creative work. Note this isn’t like real property, where the individual owns an object in perpetuity until and unless said person decides to sell it, but rather the creator may temporarily have an exclusive window to profit from the creation before it reverts back to the society at large…that’s you and me, folks.

But the “creative” industry (ok, ok, so the industry doesn’t “create” anything, it simply profits off of those who do) has decided it wants to “control” your usage of everything. The aforementioned Congress, in a clear confusion about their responsibilities under the Constitution and also clearly catering to industries who provide vast campaign contributions to keep those representatives in office, is one of the worst enemies of society’s stewardship of creative works. But unfortunately, it isn’t alone even if it is the only one that makes criminal that which has always been considered, “fair use.”
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