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 Preface

Culture vs. Copyright just happened to me, and maybe because of that it is neither a strictly scientiﬁc investigation nor a purely ﬁctional, political or autobiographical work. I cannot determine its genre. It is what it is. If I wanted badly to label this book, I would call it the diary of a naive philosopher. “A diary of what events?” you may ask.

Version I, Somewhat Real It all started when Russian researcher Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by the FBI in 2001. He gave a presentation on digital security using the example of a ﬂaw in Adobe e-book encryption. But Adobe did not thank Sklyarov. Instead they accused the researcher of violating DMCA and put him in jail. The software development community around the US was outraged. Programmers staged street protests and started on-line discussions. My son Ilya participated in the protest in front of the Adobe headquarters, and this got me involved in the discussions. This is how this book came into being, piece-by-piece. It explores different aspects of culture, its relationship to human beings and to the human condition, to civilization in general and to economics in particular. The explorers here are ﬁve ﬁrst-graders and their teacher, the naive philosopher. The issues they are focused on revolve around exclusive rights. The teacher gets inspired by the discussions, writes down his own thoughts, has doubts and new ideas, brings those back to the kids, discusses them and writes again.