Fresno Fair in the News

Gary attended the Big Fresno Fair and found a "Copyright-protected area" sign by a stall where a busker was selling the chance to have your picture taken with a bird. The idea was to use copyright law to stop you from taking your own pictures instead of buying them.
One of the side-effects of the entertainment industry's war on copying is that it's created a kind of folk-mythology about copyright being a kind of magic word you can invoke to put a fence around anything that you want to police. There's no such thing as a copyright-protected area -- it might be reasonable, if you're in the taking-pictures-of-kids-with-animals business, to take some steps to shut out the competition, but appropriating the extraordinary "author's monopoly" that is copyright is both lazy and dishonest.