I’ve mentioned this many times before and, I guess, I’ll need to mention this ever more – the technological progress of the recent years (the digital world, yes) has left many systems of our society behind. Educational and legal are the most noticeable.  Here are a few words in the insightful and funny video (originally from the Ted.com – a place of many more insightful videos). Here is a quote from a recent Boing Boing post showing the state of the legal system:
… pictures of Ford cars cannot be printed. Not just Ford logos, not just Mustang logos, the car -as a whole- is a Ford trademark and its image can’t be reproduced without permission.
Just a sec!
Set aside the outstanding stupidity of the …ord Corporation management (you see, I’m now cautious to post their name in full in case this name cannot be referred to without their permission), but what about the pix of their and other cars posted in Flickr and similar service sites under personal accounts of their users?
Going that road, we’ll end up going in litigation for posting our pictures with Clinex paper-rolls.
That’s insane…
Lana,
yes, this is one of the examples of how broken the legal system is currently (from the technological point of view at least).
By the way, you might be interested in Lawrence Lessig talk at TED. Lawrence is a famous lawyer, who understands the impact of technology on our lives and works a lot to smooth things out. He is one of the people behind Creative Commons license.
Lenia, thanks for the link!
I definitely have a reading for many hours now :)