Lou Anders has written a letter to Locus Online responding to Cory Doctorow's essay from last week, "How Copyright Broke."

I think Lou's mostly responding to issues from Cory's other writings -- not this essay in particular -- and this essay might actually be seen as a shift in Cory's thinking. "How Copyright Broke" is not really arguing that copyright is dying, though Cory has said that, in other ways and in other places, in the past. "How Copyright Broke" seems to be to be arguing for a radical expansion of the concept of fair use, to encompass all of the things people regularly do with creative products that they buy -- uses that, under a strict reading of the law, are illegal, but that are widespread and generally not considered a problem by consumers and creative folks. If Cory's argument takes hold, it could be damaging to the profits of some media corporations -- for example, if consumers would only need to buy songs once to have them available in any desired format for the rest of their lives -- but not, I think, damaging to the concept of copyright, or the protection of creative expression that copyright allows.

I've had problems with some of Cory's copyright-related essays in the past (see here at the SFBC blog, and then over at my personal blog Antick Musings for the more opinionated stuff), but this time I'm in complete agreement with him. The current obsession with licensing and limiting the uses consumers can make of their own property is self-defeating, ridiculously Byzantine in its complexity, and turning millions of otherwise law-abiding people into willfull lawbreakers (which is never a good idea).