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67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.-And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family. (Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Quoted from here.)

You can go back through this passage and replace "games" with "comics," peppering the examples with various types of comics from comic strips, comic books, silent comics, text heavy comics, single panels, comics with balloons and comics without balloons, comics on paper, comics online, comics with flash animated parts, and comics drawn on a gallery wall.

the war to rid the world of Internet “pirates” will also rid  our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the  start.

These values built a tradition that, for at least the first 180 years  of our Republic, guaranteed creators the right to build freely upon  their past, and protected creators and innovators from either state or  private control

There's no doubt that “piracy” is wrong, and that pirates should be  punished. But before we summon the executioners, we should put this  notion of “piracy” in some context. For as the concept is increasingly  used, at its core is an extraordinary idea that is almost certainly  wrong.

The idea goes something like this:

Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the  creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value.  Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have  their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else  without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy.

ng of how creative  property should work. It might well be a possible design for a system  of law protecting creative property. But the “if value, then right"  theory of creative property has never been America's theory of creative  property. It has never taken hold within our law.

Instead, in our tradition, intellectual property is an instrument. It  sets the groundwork for a richly creative society but remains  subservient to the value of creativity. The current debate has this  turned around. We have become so concerned with protecting the  instrument that we are losing sight of the value.

Yet there is an obvious reluctance, even among Japanese lawyers, to  say that the copycat comic artists are “stealing.” This form of Walt  Disney creativity is seen as fair and right, even if lawyers in  particular find it hard to say why.

It's the same with a thousand examples that appear everywhere once  you begin to look.

Instead, every society has left a certain bit of its culture free for  the taking—free societies more fully than unfree, perhaps, but all  societies to some degree.

The hard question is therefore not whether a culture is free.  All cultures are free to some degree. The hard question instead is “ How free is this culture?” How much, and how broadly, is the culture  free for others to take and build upon? Is that freedom limited to  party members? To members of the royal family? To the top ten  corporations on the New York Stock Exchange? Or is that freedom spread  broadly? To artists generally, whether affiliated with the Met or not?  To musicians generally, whether white or not? To filmmakers generally,  whether affiliated with a studio or not?

“Media literacy,” as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just  Think!, puts it, “is the ability . . . to understand, analyze, and  deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the  way media works, the way it's constructed, the way it's delivered, and  the way people access it.”

This may seem like an odd way to think about “literacy.” For most  people, literacy is about reading and writing. Faulkner and Hemingway  and noticing split infinitives are the things that “literate” people  know about.

From my perspective, probably the most important  digital divide is not access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered  with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few  people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced  to being read-only.

“Read-only.” Passive recipients of culture produced elsewhere. Couch  potatoes. Consumers. This is the world of media from the twentieth  century.

“I think you have to take the conflict of interest” out of  journalism, Winer told me. “An amateur journalist simply doesn't have a  conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest is so easily  disclosed that you know you can sort of get it out of the way.”

As Brown believes, we learn by tinkering. When “a lot of us grew up,”  he explains, that tinkering was done “on motorcycle engines, lawn-mower engines, automobiles, radios, and so on.” But digital  technologies enable a different kind of tinkering—with abstract ideas  though in concrete form. The kids at Just Think! not only think about  how a commercial portrays a politician; using digital technology, they  can take the commercial apart and manipulate it, tinker with it to see  how it does what it does. Digital technologies launch a kind of  bricolage, or “free collage,” as Brown calls it. Many get to add to or  transform the tinkering of many others.

The best large-scale example of this kind of tinkering so far is free  software or open-source software

We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes  moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an  opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building  the law to close down that technology.

“No way to run a culture,”

This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this  book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about the  subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This  piracy is wrong.

Which is not to say that excuses and justifications couldn't be made  for it. We could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one  hundred years of the American Republic, America did not honor foreign  copyrights. We were born, in this sense, a pirate nation. It might  therefore seem hypocritical for us to insist so strongly that other  developing nations treat as wrong what we, for the first hundred years  of our existence, treated as right.

So copyright's duration has increased dramatically—tripled in the  past thirty years. And copyright's scope has increased as well—from  regulating only publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And  copyright's reach has changed, as every action becomes a copy and hence  presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways to  control the use of content, and as copyright is increasingly enforced  through technology, copyright's force changes, too. Misuse is easier to  find and easier to control. This regulation of the creative process,  which began as a tiny regulation governing a tiny part of the market  for creative work, has become the single most important regulator of  creativity there is. It is a massive expansion in the scope of the  government's control over innovation and creativity; it would be  totally unrecognizable to those who gave birth to copyright's control.

There is something innocent and obvious about the claim of the  copyright warriors that the government should “protect my property.” In  the abstract, it is obviously true and, ordinarily, totally harmless.  No sane sort who is not an anarchist could disagree.

But when we see how dramatically this “property” has changed— when  we recognize how it might now interact with both technology and markets  to mean that the effective constraint on the liberty to cultivate our  culture is dramatically different—the claim begins to seem less  innocent and obvious. Given (1) the power of technology to supplement  the law's control, and (2) the power of concentrated markets to weaken  the opportunity for dissent, if strictly enforcing the massively  expanded “property” rights granted by copyright fundamentally changes  the freedom within this culture to cultivate and build upon our past,  then we have to ask whether this property should be redefined.

Not starkly. Or absolutely. My point is not that we should abolish  copyright or go back to the eighteenth century. That would be a total  mistake, disastrous for the most important creative enterprises within  our culture today.

But there is a space between zero and one, Internet culture  notwithstanding.

For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point  that we see only after surveying the range of these changes. When you  add together the effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and  changing technology, together they produce an astonishing conclusion:  Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of  the development of our culture than now.

Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were  perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only  publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more  diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even  then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were  independent of the networks. Never has copyright protected such  a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term  that was remotely as long. This form of regulation—a tiny regulation  of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding—is  now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus  technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically  benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that  our free society has known.

This is how code becomes law. The controls built into  the technology of copy and access protection become rules the violation  of which is also a violation of the law. In this way, the code extends  the law—increasing its regulation, even if the subject it regulates  (activities that would otherwise plainly constitute fair use) is beyond  the reach of the law. Code becomes law; code extends the law; code thus  extends the control that copyright owners effect—at least for those  copyright holders with the lawyers who can write the nasty letters that  Felten and aibopet.com received.

What does this industry really want?

With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So  the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about  protecting their content. The effort to block the Eldred Act is  an effort to assure that nothing more passes into the public domain. It  is another step to assure that the public domain will never compete,  that there will be no use of content that is not commercially  controlled, and that there will be no commercial use of content that  doesn't require their permission first.

The opposition to the Eldred Act reveals how extreme the other side  is. The most powerful and sexy and well loved of lobbies really has as  its aim not the protection of “property” but the rejection of a  tradition. Their aim is not simply to protect what is theirs. Their  aim is to assure that all there is is what is theirs.

But we as a culture have lost this sense of balance. We have lost the  critical eye that helps us see the difference between truth and  extremism. A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to  our tradition, now reigns in this culture—bizarrely, and with  consequences more grave to the spread of ideas and culture than almost  any other single policy decision that we as a democracy will make.

A simple idea blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much  happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So  uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't  even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying  without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in  culture that we don't even question when the control of that property  removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture  democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense.

The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration,  but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the  change in copyright, produces. It is not just that there are a few  powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media.  It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of  rights—property rights of a historically extreme form—that makes  their bigness bad.

And if there's nothing wrong with selling the  public domain, then there could be nothing wrong, in principle, with  selling access to material that is not in the public domain.

But what if the only way to get access to social and scientific data  was through proprietary services? What if no one had the ability to  browse this data except by paying for a subscription?

As many are beginning to notice, this is increasingly the reality  with scientific journals. When these journals were distributed in paper  form, libraries could make the journals available to anyone who had  access to the library. Thus, patients with cancer could become cancer  experts because the library gave them access. Or patients trying to  understand the risks of a certain treatment could research those risks  by reading all available articles about that treatment. This freedom  was therefore a function of the institution of libraries (norms) and  the technology of paper journals (architecture)—namely, that it was  very hard to control access to a paper journal.