Saturday, July 23, 2011

I'm with Cinderella.


"Copyright is the Cinderella of the law. Her rich older sisters, franchises and patents, long crowded her into the chimney-corner. Suddenly fairy godmother Invention endowed her with mechanical and electrical devices as magical as the pumpkin coach and the mice footmen. Now she swirls through the mad mazes of a glamourous ball." Zechariah Chafee (Jr.)

I remember first coming across this quote rushing through an assignment for my IP lecture. It struck me and stuck with me. I hadn't even seen the full quotation rushing as I was to beat deadlines.

Zechariah Chafee Jnr (1898-1957) was an American judicial philosopher and civil libertarian who was known to publish from time to time articles with provocative titles. An alumni of Brown and Harvard universities he would later lecture as a Professor of Law at his latter Alma Malter. Read more about Z. Chafee here

Now many summers and winters later it seems that his quote is now coming to be reality in Kenya. Look at the uproar that the MCSK and KECOBO are causing now. What about the advent of copyright trolls and dare I add the very existence of this blog?

It seems that the Kenyan legal and creative industry is now alive to the beauty of copyright and all that it entails. It should, the younger generation are the creatives are they not? They write, they make music, they create magazines, they are the copyright generation. Already bloggers are taking the first steps to sensitize themselves on what copyright really is and what it entails, look at this article here.

Credits: The photo of Z. Chafee is Public domain work (photograph 1907). Original photographer / copyright owner unknown and is sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ChafeeJrZechariah-1907-BrownArchives.jpg.

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