Authorship in the Digital Age: Should It Be Abolished?

In the Internet age, where everything seems to be always accessible to everyone, works of art and entertainment are continuously parodied.

Take GIFs, those inevitable loops of animation or live-action that may be replayed endlessly in text messages, forums, social media, or wherever else that public communities express themselves. GIFs can be used to represent movies, cartoons, music videos, YouTube videos, or anything else. Copyright is in decline. Even massively criminalizing users of art materials no longer works. Billions of rupees invested in the cultural industry are about to evaporate.

The convincing argument that copyright law is not only out-of-date but also excessively convoluted to the point of being byzantine and incomprehensible to the layperson is frequently brought up by critics. Due to this barrier to comprehension, there is also another level of difficulty: the financial hardship of taking on powerful businesses in a conflict over copyright ownership or the malleability of works of art.

A fundamental change in the conditions for the production, dissemination and promotion of artistic and cultural expression is required. Creative Commons, as proposed by Lawrence Lessig (Lessig, 2002, 2004), is not even a shadow of answers to dangerous economic and cultural situations in which we must find solutions.