Copyright, as the name implies, grants content owner the right of copy.
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In the digital realm, to move a file is to copy it somewhere else and then delete the original. in our digital era every movement is a copy, and it’s insane (and anti-democratic) to expect permission for each and every movement you make.
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In other words: We can either have a totalitarian society watching our every movement, or the death of copyrights. Which one do you prefer?
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Yeah, I thought so.
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Then again, it’s unfair for others to profit from content of creators without some payment. Right now Google is redesigning its google reader with social features to compete with Twitter and Facebook.
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Or: A giant company is using content it doesn’t own to better position itself in the market. And not paying a dime for content creators. Talk about Free.
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Is that it?

the right of tracks

metadata - the information about the information - is powerful. So far, google keeps it to itself, simply because nobody asked.
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assume the peanut association commissions me to draw… well… peanuts. imagine if I can publish it on my own network systems (twitter, blog, facebook) and later give them the complete track history to determine the success of the campaign, and be paid accordingly. Now that’s a revenue model.
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too bad under existing rules, I - the content creator -have no say on my own creation tracks. heck, I’m not even allowed to see it if I don’t own the database. And oh boy, these social networks have a field day with that data.
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Can we just forget all this cry over copyright and move to a trackright system? Like, you’re free to publish my work anywhere, but you are required by law to share the tracks with me. reputation is the new currency anyways and I need all the bragging rights I can get.
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That sound reasonable.

boing boing talks about what happens with second chances when computers don’t forget.
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I’ve been thinking bout it for quite some time: if computers dont forget, how can society move on?
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I imagine some cultures will become a class society, a faux democracy with some selected few picked in the infancy with a spin machine all over their lives, to make them shiny, hence electable. since this lifetime spin doctoring is damn expensive, it would be a society in thrall of interest groups. puritan societies tend to that: they have high standards of how people should live, and won’t give it up that easy.
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other will be more forgiving, humane, letting it go of our previous image of ourselves. then again, it can become corrupt with double standards. some people are free to do something, some are not. it’s all about PR wars for the public perception. latin america works this way.
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we can also point to radical transparency, a sort of digital eye contact: you’re free to look at any info, but the records (of who, what, when) are also public. if you see me, i see you seeing me. we humans are good at that. it will be a society of bots, daemons amassing data about spectators of ourselves, giving us reports and asking for “what to do next”. for that to happen, we need to legislate our way in: it’s a complicated world, but at least it levels the playing field.
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or, we can legislate each person possess its own digital shadow - say, we have an untransferable copyright over our digital traces - and any system that keeps personal info is in fact dealing with radioactive material. pirate party to restore privacy, heh?