And yes, I mean yours. You are probably aware of the recent Associated Press-instigated skirmish, and if not, well, here’s a mostly decent summary. The short version is that AP threatened small web sites with lawsuits for quoting the headlines and ledes of some of its stories. While the the AP is being fairly aggressive about it (pushing for a licensing fee to quote up to 25 words of any AP story) right now, I suspect they’ll find that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. But this story is just another reminder of where we’re heading. Nielsen Hayden gets to the quick of it:
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.
The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property†law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.
If you think he (and I) are overreacting, look a little deeper into what’s going on with our information infrastructure.  The network is transforming to enable pervasive monitoring and technical control over content, the control over that network is consolidating into a group that appears to be more willing to adopt common policies, and the laws are being rewritten to criminalize any attempts to avoid the exercise of this emerging control. That chokehold by a few may not matter to you (or at all) when it’s the next Miley Cyrus single, but it certainly should when we’re talking about the details of the next corruption scandal or natural disaster response.