…but now Apple is busting down doors in Palo Alto while Bill Gates rids the world of mosquitoes. What the… is going on?
Last night Jon Stewart spent 8 minutes lambasting Apple over the iPhone prototype story. Apple has been mostly ignoring what the press says about it, but this is bound to get their attention. A couple more great quotes:
The cops had to bash in the guys door? Don’t they know there’s an App for that?
If you want to break down someone’s door, why don’t you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone!
The fact that Stewart is a comedian may contribute to his different take on Intellectual Property. On The Media had a recent report noting that comedians don’t copyright their jokes; instead, they rely on an informal system of intellectual property enforcement. This is Dotan Oliarand, a University of Virginia law professor who studied the question:
The major sanction [that comedians are using to stop others from stealing their jokes and bits] is reputation, also. In that business, reputation is everything. And if you have a bad reputation, agents are not gonna to want to represent you. Club owners might not want to have you in their club. People are not going to be willing to work with you on a comedy bill. Like eight or ten comedians would work every night, and if you can’t find other people who are willing to share the stage with you, you’re pretty much gonna be out of work…
[T]he norm system has to be compared with the formal copyright law, which is difficult to enforce too because it’s so expensive to bring a lawsuit in federal court that often it’s just not worth it, right? So both systems have their flaws. The norm system flaws are not, obviously, at least to us, worse than the legal system’s flaws.
Stewart also showed off his journalist side last night, hammering Ken Blackwell for details of what President Obama has specifically done to subvert the Constitution. Blackwell was the first African-American candidate for governor of a major party in Ohio and is now Vice Chair of the Republican National Committee’s Platform Committee. He was on Stewart’s program to promote his book, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.
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