Copyright gone mad
Copyrighted fabric: no selling the stuff you make from it.
Please note: This fabric can be purchased for personal sewing projects only. This print cannot be used for items made for resale..!
Reprodebot sells fabric that comes with a "license agreement" that prohibits you from making commercial goods out of the material. What this means, at the end of the day, is that they're not selling you anything at all - instead, they're licensing the fabric to you, and it isn't your property, and you can't do with it what you want.
"Intellectual property" is a recent term-of-art, and historically, it's been about copyright as a metaphor for property. On the other hand, selling textiles has been around for millennia, and there's nothing metaphorical about your ability to truly own the shirt on your back.
In the name of preserving a muddy metaphor about property, we're increasingly willing to abandon real property. It's a kind of feudalism, wherein people who can lay some claim to "copyrightable expression" (whether it's a fabric design, the software in a car engine, or the movie on a DVD) are the only people in the world who get to possess real property, while we peons are stuck with being pathetic licensors whose only remedy, if we don't like the license terms on offer, is to try to find another feudal lord who'll cut us a better deal.
Ever wonder why your butcher, the kid who sewed your shoes, or the woman who picked your fruit can't get the same kind of deal? Why should screening a design on a bolt of fabric magically confer the right to turn what's obviously a sale into a non-negotiable license, but not doing back-breaking stoop-labor?
Please note: This fabric can be purchased for personal sewing projects only. This print cannot be used for items made for resale..!
Reprodebot sells fabric that comes with a "license agreement" that prohibits you from making commercial goods out of the material. What this means, at the end of the day, is that they're not selling you anything at all - instead, they're licensing the fabric to you, and it isn't your property, and you can't do with it what you want.
"Intellectual property" is a recent term-of-art, and historically, it's been about copyright as a metaphor for property. On the other hand, selling textiles has been around for millennia, and there's nothing metaphorical about your ability to truly own the shirt on your back.
In the name of preserving a muddy metaphor about property, we're increasingly willing to abandon real property. It's a kind of feudalism, wherein people who can lay some claim to "copyrightable expression" (whether it's a fabric design, the software in a car engine, or the movie on a DVD) are the only people in the world who get to possess real property, while we peons are stuck with being pathetic licensors whose only remedy, if we don't like the license terms on offer, is to try to find another feudal lord who'll cut us a better deal.
Ever wonder why your butcher, the kid who sewed your shoes, or the woman who picked your fruit can't get the same kind of deal? Why should screening a design on a bolt of fabric magically confer the right to turn what's obviously a sale into a non-negotiable license, but not doing back-breaking stoop-labor?
posted by Basil Epicurus at 11:09 AM
1 Comments:
This copyright is going a bit too far i'd say. getting too much & boring too.
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