When minds meet (like at conferences) the share reading lists.  One of the books that was generously reccommended (thanks @jonmott and @leighblackall) by conference goers is called The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is relevant to us at COMARKER™ because it is a marketing book, and that is what we are attempting to do, but it doesn’t offer prescriptions.  Instead, it causes nervous yet excited beads of sweat to form on my forehead.  I am not media illiterate; I have read Mcluhan, but I feel late to the party reading Cluetrain ten years after its first publication.

One section that hits hard today, just as the Canadian Government is deciding how closely it wants to follow America’s DMCA, is in the chapter “In Defense of Optimism”:

If you think the value of the Internet is in the value of the content on it, then you likely think of copyright as your warrior king. In this way copyright becomes the first among all and thus does it twist our culture around its bony fingers.

Of course copyright serves a purpose: “The Congress shall have Power to promote the progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Our forefathers wrote that in beautiful script in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of our Constitution. Copyright exists to provide an incentive to creators to continue creating. Yet no one can argue that a writer would be too discouraged to write a book if copyright didn’t deliver a royalty check to her graveside address a full seventy years after she’s put up her personal RIP® Copyright’s current death +70 term thus has nothing to do with incentives. Rather, copyright now exists in its current form to prop up industries that used to benefit from the natural scarcity of material goods. Now that creative works are plentiful, copyright tries through law to reinstate a scarcity that technology has obviated and that the market has repudiated.

The evidence of this is all around us. Computing systems lock us out of reusing content even in quite legal ways by baking digital rights management (DRM) capabilities into their operating systems and hardware. One provider of Internet access- AT&T-has announced it will patrol its network for what it considers to be infringing material. Apple iTunes has required you to hack your own computer to transfer songs from one machine to another, and Apple’s iStore only lets you install iPhone software that it has approved.

None of this is surprising. The entertainment industry now includes not only the moviemakers but the network providers and the software and hardware manufacturers, and they all have an interest in keeping their content scarce, even if it means that culture now runs into a dead-end, and our progress in science and the lively arts is throttled so the mainstream can continue to dazzle us with its retreads and safe bets. If we took as our goal the maximum flowering of culture, rather than protecting the interests of a tiny handful of producers and publishersw we could have a world full of music and creativity.

My colleague Kirk and I have been having an argument about theft of IP, specifically in relation to Mashable culture, artifacts like the songs by Girl Talk and The Books.  He says that robust ownership is required for a healthy culture.  I disagree.  The above passage is more fuel for my fire.  I sincerely hope that Canada’s polititians do not do what I think they will do.  I hope that we have strong fair use in our IP laws.  I hope that I don’t need to start shrouding my IP address.  I am not as optimistic as this chapter of Cluetrain.

Thanks OpenED09 for putting resources in my hands that confirm my suspicions.