But my point is more about peoples’ attitudes towards such quoting. The music industry and Hollywood will sue if a 2-second clip from one of their songs or movies appears in a mash-up. In contrast, bloggers tend to be happy to have even large selections of their works quoted by other bloggers. Whatever the legal status of those behaviors, the attitudes toward unauthorized copying are clearly different.

I seldom frequent the huge “shopping mall” blogs like Glenn Reynolds &c, so I’m not exactly sure just what “quote one another promiscuously” really means. But how is quoting an excerpt even from a New York Times editorial, for the purpose of commentary and criticism, anything other than a fair use? Why is copyright even entering the picture here?

I seldom frequent the huge “shopping mall” blogs like Glenn Reynolds &c, so I’m not exactly sure just what “quote one another promiscuously” really means. But how is quoting an excerpt even from a New York Times editorial, for the purpose of commentary and criticism, anything other than a fair use? Why is copyright even entering the picture here?

For the same reason they pay $$$ for WATER when there is as good (or at least nearly as good) stuff coming out of the kitchen faucet.

I’m not going to bother finding the links, but there’s a lot of debunking of Anderson, to the extent that yeah, there’s a shift, but it’s more like 80/20 to 70/30 – matters if you’re in the retail industry, but nowhere near as big a deal as it’s being hyped.

Beware anyone who tells you “This new technology makes things all warm and fuzzy”. It has a habit of not working out that way (things change, but not necessarily the way the hypester predicts).

Exhibit A: The DMCA.

That’s an excellent point, and one I can’t really quarrel with. I was being sloppy when I said that people at the head would eschew copyright. Clearly what the top bloggers have been doing is dramatically relaxing their the terms on which they offer their content. But they’re not abandoning copyright entirely, and they’re unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.

But as a practical matter, I don’t think that koswithoutadvertising.com would have much of an impact on Kos’s bottom line. Kos’s readers like Kos, and they’re probably happy to help him out by looking at the version of his site with ads, assuming the ads aren’t intrusive. And if the ads were intrusive, koswithoutadvertising.com would be the least of his worries. The far bigger worry would be all the traffic he’d be losing to Atrios and TPM.

So yes, Kos would probably miffed at the existence of koswithoutadvertising.com. But he wouldn’t be anywhere near as fixated on that as the RIAA is on stamping out bootleg Madonna songs. Sites that knock off content that’s already available for free are going to have a much harder time gaining an audience than sites offering content that costs money elsewhere.

Greg: sounds like a fascinating paper, thanks for the link.

Enigma, perhaps you can do the honors.

And as this hit dominated culture loses ground, it will start to lose money, and at a certain tipping point, that hit-dominated culture will become a money loser, and it will very quickly evaporate. But the process won’t be pretty–I am sure we will see all kinds of legal challenges to distribution of long-tail content.

Interesting, also, that the paper above itself is available for free download.

I’ve posted an SSRN draft of a piece that tries to put this shift in the context of reputation incentives vs. monetary incentives. As I argue in the article, creativity fueled by reputation incentives has a long tradition and it is not necessarily anti-IP or anti-market. If you consider the enormous investments in advertising, for instance (and particularly in viral advertising as an effort to harness decentralized P2P-like distribution), you can see markets and big corporate players spending a good deal of money trying to get people to make copies of creative works.

Here’s a link if you are interested:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917396

It’s forthcoming in Boston University Law Review (Feb. 2007).