Dan Bricklin’s new essay, “Copy Protection Robs The Future,” is an important addition to the discussion of why Hollywood, the music companies, software sellers and, increasingly, the big publishers are creating a serious mess with their incessant push to establish absolute control over all copyrighted works. The end of fair use rights, which are so crucial to scholarship and libraries (and everyone else), is bad enough. Now Dan explains why the pure-protection regime is dangerous to history itself.
“With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete,” he says. Yet the entertainment and publishing industries and their allies in software will not have any incentive to preserve anything but best-selling works. The stuff of history is not about best-sellers.