Men with common ideals coming together into a communal living environment such that brother can hold brother responsible to a shared oath… This was the promise of fraternities. Making assurances that others would not profit unscrupulously from another’s work, encouraging creators to share their artistry with the world such that each may grow in the sharing… This was the promise of copyrights. Things have, er, drifted a bit since then. Nowadays, most peoples’ interactions with fraternities and copyrights involve hazing incidents, sexual assault allegations, Cease-and-Desist letters, and “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.” errors on YouTube.

Exclusivity is not an evil on its own, the idea that a fraternity or copyright should belong to those who put the work into it seems like a basic right. Still, any closed system tends toward groupthink (via a genetic inbreeding of ideas), easily evidenced in people thinking its okay to make others swallow goldfish or pay $2.99 for a “My Humps” Ringtone. In many ways the Open Source community has paved the next evolutionary step here, recognizing the importance of interoperability as a glue to bring together smaller, autonomous parts. While one programmer may “own” the calendar plug-in and another the event plug-in, both benefit from being able to share data (and, of course, opening up the components to the community can help even further). The current copyright players seem to have taken Sacred Oaths never to reveal the Inner Secrets of the DRM Brotherhood. Sony and Apple, I’m looking in your direction.

Abusive behavior, in contrast, is an evil on its own. There are no excuses that can be made for the now infamous RIAA suits against little girls, dead grandmas, and a family without a computer for file sharing. The RIAA has sent too many innocent freshmen to the hospital. It’s not much of a stretch to compare the Sony Rootkit fiasco with slipping an unsuspecting girl a roofie.

The collusion behind the scenes, the winking, nodding, and nudging, is just as bad with copyrights as with any fraternity. The Blu-ray format, for instance, is vying to become the next step beyond DVDs (holding up to 9 hours of HD video) and is being heavily marketed by a coalition including content-owners Sony, Disney, Time-Warner, and Fox along with hardware manufacturers Apple, Dell, HP, Panasonic, etc., all of whom are very pleased about the Blu-ray’s built-in DRM and working together to help it succeed. Like a frat house rivalry, the competing HD-DVD format has risen to egg their front door.

There is a reason to be hopeful for both fraternities and copyrights. For every Old School there’s a New School. The fraternity of which I was a part in college was then undergoing a massive shift to re-invent the college fraternity experience with their Balanced Man Program. While outlawing not only hazing but pledges all together (if you’re asked to join, you’re in) and providing a series of challenges with increasing levels of community responsibility, it has seen a 90% undergraduate retention rate and 3.0 national average GPA.

Likewise, the sluggish caterpillar of the copyright has transformed itself into the magical butterfly of Creative Commons licenses. Despite all the hub-bub around Google’s acqusition of YouTube last week, which some surmise is more about protecting Fair Use laws than business models, up-and-comer video site Revver is already putting CC to work—and passing the profits on to the creators.

I have plenty to say about LonelyGirl15, but I’ll hold it for another time.