Re: to the point/Latin mutteri

m.lean[_at_]qut.edu.au (Michael Lean) writes:
>
>Does our copyright act get longer and longer, or will the same
>questions (and possibly litigation) occur over and over?

And Dan Agin (specpress[_at_]genie.geis.com) writes:
>
>Don Berman points out, and I agree, that the law cannot deal a priori
>with all possible combinations and permutations of real behavior. But
>the copyright law in the U.S. has been in a state of flux for a long
>time now, and no one seems able to formulate statutes that are
>universally acceptable.

My question is:

Has anyone plotted the length (in words, characters, or morphemes) of the US (or anyone else's) copyright statutes (or case law for that matter) over time?

I was alluding to this growth in a meeting yesterday but did not have objective data at my fingertips. I anticipate something like the following may be true:

|                                   x
|                                  x
|                                 x
|                              x
|                       x
|       x
_____________________________________
                            1972  1994

Certainly by way of evidence of this claim, one can simply look up each of the words in the current statutes in the OED and find date of first entry into the language and there is a lot of vocabulary which simply did not exist 30 years ago.

However has anyone studied this curious corpus lexicographically?

Are there simple charts of the growth of the size of the various parts of US law existing anywhere?

If copyright law grows exponentially while other areas of law grow within the confines of some nice polynomial, it would seem to have some relevance to the hypothesis that technology places an asymptotically unbearable burden on copyright law: a hypthesis that I've seen people on both sides willing to argue with strong conviction.

David Dailey
<david.p.dailey[_at_]williams.edu> Received on Sat Nov 19 1994 - 04:05:40 GMT