It’s someone’s birthday today. I’d love to tell you about it, but I’m not sure if the use of his name (clue: he’s a duck) is a violation of trademark or copyright law. You see, the individual in question is a property (and you thought slavery had been abolished!) of a large media company that regularly protects its intellectual property with considerable aggression. Back in 2005, I got intrigued with the copyfight movement and created a couple of parody products on CafePress – the CopyReich Shop , which pretty heavy-handedly pointed a finger at the RIAA and MPAA’s fascist behavior, and the Copyfight Shop, which poked fun at the Creative Commons license. I suggested them for BoingBoing.net, and got this reply from Cory Doctorow: “This stuff is funny, Ian! I’m uncomfortable with the Nazi stuff, though — I’m a believer in Godwin’s Law and worry that the discreditation that accrues to its violators would outweigh the humor. Sorry.” I guess I was too edgy for the edgy. Oddly, CafePress didn’t mind the images, although recently they wouldn’t let me use these images. Maybe they’re anti-gay. Who knows. In any case, something that’s often overlooked when people discuss copyrights is who they were intended to protect, and what their purpose really was. In the United States, the government gave itself the right to copyright material ostensibly to: “…promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” (US Constitution, Section 8, Clause 8). The idea being that if a creative person could gain an exclusive financial benefit from their creation for a time, there would be plenty of motivation to create wonderful things that would benefit mankind later, when these creations entered the public domain. In my opinion, this has all been completely perverted by the copyright extension act to protect the profits of corporations, at the expense of the individual. What do you think? Below are the images from the CafePress shops.

This image is from the shop that made Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing reject our suggested link:

This shop was intended to make fun of the communist nature of “open source” copyrights:

This is Mickey, who sadly is copyrighted until the end of time: