Issues & questions that
Joe Clark’s upcoming book on copyright for creators will address
Reprehensible? Probably, yeah.
But maybe not in the way you think
With any luck, by the time Cranky Copyright is completed, the numerous copyright-infringement lawsuits against Perez Hilton will have been settled.
In the meantime, the question I wish to pose to copyleftists and mash-up apologists is as follows:
If “remixing” other people’s work is a hallmark of 21st-century, “read/write” culture, why haven’t you jumped to the defence of Perez Hilton, who duplicates, defaces, and republishes photographers’ work on his own site?
Isn’t that kind of “remix” at least as clever as something Danger Mouse could come up with?
If you aren’t defending him, why not? Is it because his métier – fashion, starlets, celebs – is too tacky and girly for you? (Is the very gay Perez Hilton too tacky and girly himself?)
Or do you think that, just as it is pretty hard to defame a public figure because they’re expected to endure lots of public comment, pictures of public figures are fair game too? (Even if the creator of the picture is not a public figure, let alone the subject of the picture?)