Comments on: Interview With Cory Doctorow http://www.slaw.ca/2009/11/18/interview-with-cory-doctorow/ Canada's online legal magazine Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:41:13 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: John G http://www.slaw.ca/2009/11/18/interview-with-cory-doctorow/comment-page-1/#comment-708542 John G Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:40:07 +0000 http://www.slaw.ca/?p=14180#comment-708542 TVO had an <a href="http://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&bpn=779651&ts=2009-11-12%2020:00:00.0" rel="nofollow">interview<a> with Cory D last week. Interesting to watch him not answer Steve Paikin's repeated questions about how one makes a living with free downloading, though Cory D does. He also ultimately distinguishes between big commercial uses who should respect copyright (without defining how big one should be before this applies) and consumer uses where copyright is a barrier to ... whatever consumers want, apparently. I suppose the commercial lawyer would say that the 26.000-word licence agreement is intended to allocate rights, rather than take them away. The law allocates rights in ways that may not suit the commercial purposes of potential users of them, so creators and users may agree to allocate them differently. As with any other contract, questions of bargaining power arise, and unconscionability, and imperfect knowledge etc. But the big contract is not just to take away rights that someone might otherwise have - parts maybe, but not all... TVO had an interview with Cory D last week. Interesting to watch him not answer Steve Paikin's repeated questions about how one makes a living with free downloading, though Cory D does. He also ultimately distinguishes between big commercial uses who should respect copyright (without defining how big one should be before this applies) and consumer uses where copyright is a barrier to … whatever consumers want, apparently.

I suppose the commercial lawyer would say that the 26.000-word licence agreement is intended to allocate rights, rather than take them away. The law allocates rights in ways that may not suit the commercial purposes of potential users of them, so creators and users may agree to allocate them differently.

As with any other contract, questions of bargaining power arise, and unconscionability, and imperfect knowledge etc. But the big contract is not just to take away rights that someone might otherwise have – parts maybe, but not all…

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