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On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web

Fantastic post On Linux, Software Patents, Shakespeare & the Web. My favorite excerpt:

Their use of the phrase “cultural paywall” is loaded. They seem to want to imply, without doing the work to support the contention, that the culture (and by that I assume they mean the great poetry and drama that we inherited from the Elizabethans) was only possible because playgoers were forced to pay for content. The analogy, as far as it goes, asserts that the web is a kind of modern day playhouse that lacks a “cultural paywall”. Therefore, no modern day Shakespeare could possibly make a living or “survive the web”.  Fair enough, but their argument is embarrassingly simplistic and glosses over a far more complex relationship among the poets themselves.

For instance, while they credit the very existence of Hamlet to the “cultural paywall”, they completely ignore or are collectively ignorant of the fact that Hamlet was probably a derivative work based on a play by Thomas Kyd. If the copyright laws had been enforced then, as they are today, Kyd would have sued Shakespeare for every nickel he was worth. Hamlet wouldn’t have been possible.

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