Re: consortium to discuss electronic storage

At 4:09 PM 9/23/93 -0400, Trotter Hardy wrote:
>But this is exactly why one has a copyright LAW: in cases where
>the technology makes copies very commercially advantageous
>otherwise. If the technology did not permit good quality
>copies, at low cost, there would be no need for a copyright law.
>Copyright came in with the printing press, not the quill pen.

Yes, I do understand... Perhaps I was too brief in my comment (an online tendancy of mine is to be much too brief).

The digital world is much more of a radical change to the written word (or multimedia word, picture and sound) as the printing press was to stone tablets.

For example, patent law is based on manufacturing and sales typically requiring some noticeable expenditure of resources. Today, my thirteen year old son can infringe a patent by writing and giving away a piece of software. Note: GIVING AWAY. I do not believe that existing intellectual property law (as originally conceived, or as it exists today) every imagined that significant intellectual property could be developed and/or reproduced and then given away for free. The mind boggles if Ben Franklin could have imagined anyone building stoves and giving them away...

The digital world *IS* that dramatic a change that I believe our intellectual property laws will end up being rewritten and rethought to take this into account. How will things end up? I don't know, since there is some significant money at stake here especially in the hands of today's "print" publishers, but things are changing...

The average citizen is developing the habit and expectation that copying is ok for their own use (taping a TV program, copying a CD to a cassete for the car, photocopying a magazine article, etc.). By the next generation (perhaps as early as ten years from now), the public's perception of fair-use will be that everything except out-and-out commercial copying is ok. The law will then either be changed to conform to society, or it will be unenforceable.

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Glenn Tenney
tenney[_at_]netcom.com            Amateur radio: AA6ER
Voice: (415) 574-3420        Fax: (415) 574-0546