Re: Napster destroys Western Civilization

a recent conference at the New York University Law School Information Law Institute, hosted by Yochai Benkler, developed some interesting ideas about the application of copyright to digital music and other media. see
http://www.law.nyu.edu/ili/conferences/ and review the papers, especially those by William Fisher and Steve Shavell. (NYU is supposed to post the webcast archive, too, but it seems to be taking a long time.)

IMHO we ought to give copyright a chance before we turn to these other experiments in incenting creative expressions. The conference participants agreed more or less that a return of U.S. copyright law to its state before 1976 ought to be most satisfactory. On the other hand, participants such as Neil Netanel and Joel Reidenberg argued that it was now too late to do that, since the U.S. has international treaty obligations that are hard to revoke.

So in the meantime perhaps we ought to look closely at "fair use" in copyright law. The RIAA wishes to deny ANY FAIR USE AT ALL for users of digital music, and they are now suing under the DMCA to enforce exactly that. For example, the RIAA and MPAA claim that users of computer storage devices do not have rights to back up digital audiovisual streams to disc unless the device is covered by the Audio Home Recording Act, and so a license fee is paid to music producers when buying blank media, and the manufacturer of the hardware device agrees to embody encryption and a rights management scheme so the producers can control copying. But the computer manufacturers and users by no means wish to cooperate with this idea.

So here we see the arguments of Sony v Universal Studios all over again, this time with MP3 or other digital media instead of the Betamax tape machine. Can a reasonable solution to this problem be found as it was in the Sony case, or do we have to throw away U.S. copyright as we know it and turn to the experiments proposed by Fisher or Shavell?

-- 
"Eric"  Eric Eldred  Eldritch Press
mailto:Eldred[_at_]EldritchPress.org
http://www.eldritchpress.org/EricEldred.vcf