Shur-Ofry, Michal --- "Copyright, Complexity, and Cultural Diversity: A Skeptic’s View" [2012] ELECD 697; in Pager, A. Sean; Candeub, Adam (eds), "Transnational Culture in the Internet Age" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: Transnational Culture in the Internet Age

Editor(s): Pager, A. Sean; Candeub, Adam

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857931337

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Copyright, Complexity, and Cultural Diversity: A Skeptic’s View

Author(s): Shur-Ofry, Michal

Number of pages: 28

Extract:

10. Copyright, complexity, and cultural
diversity: a skeptic's view
Michal Shur-Ofry*

10.1 INTRODUCTION

Father, Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
And They live over the sea,
While We live over the way,
But ­ would you believe it? ­
They look upon We
As only a sort of They1

Human attraction to the similar and rejection of the unknown "other"
has long occupied the attention of writers, researchers and philosophers.2


* For helpful discussion and valuable comments to earlier drafts I thank
Katya Assaf, Michael Assaf, Guy Pessach, Ofer Tur-Sinai, Christopher Yoo, Eyal
Zamir, the participants of the Bits without Borders Conference held at Michigan
State University (September 2010) and the participants of Complexity-An
Interdisciplinary Perspective Conference held by COST-European Cooperation
in Science and Technology, together with the Racah Institute of Physics at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (March 2012). The opinions expressed are
solely my own. An earlier version of the chapter, in Hebrew, appeared in Is Law
Important? (Neta Ziv and Daphna Hacker eds, Tel Aviv University Press, 2010),
569.
1 Rudyard Kipling, We and They (first verse) in Debits and Credits (1926).
2 Indeed, Kipling's astute observations in We and They were reinforced by

ample sociological research concerning people's tendency to associate and bond
with similar others ­ see, e.g. Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton Friendship
as a Social Process: A Substantive and Methodological Analysis in ...