Dave Title recently had a post on his My Media Musings blog, where he talks about a student “lip dub” music video, which he notes almost certainly violates copyright law, but that it would be really dumb for the copyright holder (in this case, whoever holds the copyright on music by the Black-Eyed Peas) to enforce. Then Title busts out a line that should be repeated often:
Protecting a copyright often seems to fly in the face of good business.
Bingo. This is an argument we’ve been making for over a decade. There are many in both business and law who seem to assume that because you can enforce a right, it means that it always makes business sense to enforce that right. And yet, as we see over and over and over again, it’s quite often not the case at all. In an awful lot of cases, very strong arguments can be made that the reverse is true and that protecting your copyright actually does a lot more damage than good.
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