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In light of the Library of Congress‘ decision to allow a number of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including jailbreaking (unlocking) iPhones, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote an opinion piece for Read Write Web on the importance of protecting fair use rights is important for the future of a culture that relies more-and-more on media artifacts:

“It’s a value-added, remixed, platform-built economy these days. That’s a whole new channel opening up for innovation, the democratization of the economy and for revenue creation. Does it cannibalize the old economy? Not if the experience of two of history’s fastest-growing platform dynamos (iPhone and Facebook) are any indication. This digital economy could be called post-scarcity not because scarcity is no longer realistic or valuable, but because it’s no longer a precondition for the creation of value. In fact, scarcity may produce less total value in the future than the ecosystem of augmentation, annotation, remixing and fair use of the items formerly considered scarce will.”

Read the full article at Read Write Web.