
You write: “Back in 2001, the European Parliament came together to pass regulations and set up copyright laws for the internet, a technology that was just finding its footing after the dot com boom and bust. Wikipedia had just been born, and there were 29 million websites. No one could imagine the future of this rapidly growing ecosystem — and today, the internet is even more complex. Over a billion websites, countless mobile apps, and billions of additional users. We are more interconnected than ever. We are more global than ever. But 17 years later, the laws that protect this content and its creators have not kept up with the exponential growth and evolution of the web.”
So far, so good. Your proposal? To keep the present structure largely intact, and to leave in place a system that undermines the creative community and the ability to invest in new cultural production. Bizarre. We’ve had almost 20 years of governance under the present framework in which massive commercial internet platforms are largely absolved of responsibility for their conduct. Seems to me that it’s time to try something new. Something that treasures human values while promoting innovation not dependent upon theft or misappropriation. There’s a brighter world out there. If you try hard enough, you can almost taste it. Or we can, as you propose, continue our present unhealthy diet in which the food is bland, but plentiful.
