The Cranky Copyright Book

The Cranky Copyright Book is all about copyright reform for creators. I’m not just talking about lone individuals doing unique things. I’ll also be covering entire creative industries that are made up of atomized individuals, with scarcely a union or conglomerate or shared workspace among them.

At this stage, I’ve got two candidate groups:

1. If even copyleftists agree that copyright provides an incentive to be creative, why is nobody sticking up for typeface designers?
   • You can’t copyright a typeface in the U.S. or Canada. (You can actually patent a font in the United States. Does that make any sense?)
   • If you “pirate” a song, pretty much all you can do with it is listen to it; if you “pirate” a font, you can use it to run an entire publishing house. (Songs and fonts are both computer files, of course, so you can distribute them at will – and people do. But the intended use is crucially different.)
   • Now copyleftists are clamouring to give Web browsers unfettered access to every font.
   Given that it can take two years to complete a single typeface, which may retail for as little as 20 bucks per weight on MyFonts, what needs to be changed to preserve an industry that is at the cornerstone of literacy?
2. How about fashion designers?
   • Could there possibly be a reason why it’s so easy to find pirated versions of Vuitton and Fendi handbags?
   • But those are large corporate “luxury brand” houses and I expect you have a hard time shedding tears for them. (That’s a restatement of the music-piracy argument, incidentally.) Well, what about the mom-and-pops, like the tiny fashion house Mercy, whose jacket design was pirated by Diane Von Furstenberg’s firm? Are they small enough to worry about?

I have some ideas for a few more categories of atomized creators who dearly need protection, including photographers (whom Flickr is slowly killing off) and architects. This is one area that requires extensive research.