Guardian Triptych: Go Gowers!
Some really fab coverage on Gowers in the Guardian and the Observer, starting with this Leader from Friday’s edition:
“…The report was given a guarded welcome by the recently formed Open Rights group which campaigned strongly against extending the 50-year limit, but the war is not won yet. The Gowers report is only a staging post, a way of influencing UK government thinking before Whitehall submits its own policy to Brussels where the final decisions will be taken. The real lobbying has only just begun.”Then on Saturday one of my favourite writers, Marina Hyde, throws in her twopence worth:
“It was, of course, barely a fortnight ago that readers of these pages were pleased to take a lesson in political theory from my temporary Guardian colleague Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red and a signatory of the aforementioned ad, who opened a presumably self-parodic opinion piece with the statement “copyright is fundamentally socialist”. Mick then contrived to conflate notions of intellectual property - and there’s something about “property” that grates with our fifth-form Marxist’s thesis - with solid leftwing values, though I’m afraid I’d rather lost track of his point by the second mention of “the free flow of ideas”, and realised we were being asked to conceive of a Beverley Sisters track as such.”And finally, new media heavyweight John Naughton files his analysis on Sunday:
“American neocons like to say that the only things found in the middle of the road are ‘white lines and dead armadillos’. Much the same applies to intellectual property (IP)…”As someone who’s devoted the last two years to getting accessible arguments about IP into the national press, I’m celebrating.
