Copyrights and Stupidity
It's getting to the point where I'm wondering whether copyright law has any value at all. Witness this idiotic proposal from Germany:
It looks as if publishers might really be lobbying for obtaining a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolise speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder.
I can see it now - the literary police swooping in and shutting down a blog for malicious reuse of a sentence. If sentences can be copyrighted, are there any limits at all? The only "positive" from this is that it reassures me that North America does not have a monopoly on stupidity with respect to copyright law....
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