Day June 9, 2022

How Can You Save a Dying Language When Copyright Lets Somebody Own Its Key Learning Materials?

[Glyn Moody] One of deep-seated problems with copyright is that its supporters believe everything created should be “owned” by someone and protected from being “stolen” by others. Walled Culture has already written about how that’s a bad fit for writing music, and the NBC News site has a fascinating story about how the same issue is plaguing a very different world – that of indigenous languages (pointed out by D. J. Mary on Twitter). It concerns the Lakota language, one of many native American languages that are at risk of extinction because so few people speak them fluently. In recent years, there have been increasing efforts to create language resources from the surviving speakers, to prevent the language and its culture being lost, and to produce learning materials.

Progress as Impact: A Contemporary View of the Copyright and Patent Clause

[Alina Ng] Abstract: The Constitution grants Congress the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts through the intellectual property clause. ... This article argues that intellectual property laws need to have a more contemporary understanding of progress, one that reflects the reality and practicality of how progress actually unfolds and shows how construing progress as making an impact on social and economic welfare through entrepreneurial activities may be a more contemporarily appropriate understanding we should strive for.