Rad Geek People's Daily

This week in utterly deranged copyright maximalism:

Just a reminder: Sydney Gifford is not claiming that Alyssa Sheil made a copy of any of her online content, not even one copy of one post or image. She’s claiming that Sheil’s inherently vague and indefinable je-ne-sais-quoi is just too similar to allow.

The entire principle of copyright, and so-called intellectual property broadly, is and always has been, basically obscene, censorious, tyrannical and absurd. This lawsuit would be bad enough if it were a normal assertion of copyright against, say, someone copying images or text from her online lifestyle posts and trying to police the authorized use of those materials and set the boundaries of what is or is not allowed as fair use. But this lawsuit is ludicrous and contemptible even if taken on copyright’s own terms, even if you stipulate the whole silly pseudo-propertarian structure of intellectual, literary and photographic property rights. Once again we have a lawsuit premised on the idea that copyright holders are entitled to forbid and censor works that aren’t even copies of their material, on the maximalist view that intellectual property extends not only to controlling copies or direct derivative works, but even allowing free-ranging, open-ended censorship of completely distinct original works that the copyright holder deems to have a completely indefinable vibe or aesthetic somehow or another influenced by that of their own original work. Copyright law was supposedly about controlling copying; that’s a bad enough idea, but it takes some truly deranged copyright maximalism (and a credulous press, willing to indulge this self-promoting flight of fancy) to try to recast the whole mess as some sort of an open-ended prerogative to forbid, punish or shake down anyone who consumes the work the copyright holder produces, or to demand a veto over the basic fact of artistic and cultural influence. That’s bananas.