I suspect that the increasing hoopla about copyright will increase.
I think the core problem is that copyright is obsolete for the new media.
Some new mechanism may need to replace it. We may call it copyright. But I think copyright, in the sense, of legally controlling who can make copies of a work will be dead for a significant amount of creative work.
There are several reasons for this.
First is the fact that "copying" no longer is a definitive act that we can point to saying "this is the line between the author's rights and the user's rights". To use work on the net, it has to be copied. Copying is instantaneous, easy, and is done automatically as an intrinsic part of usage. Copying no longer means much.
Second, is a pervasive economic law of the Internet -- "if it is free anywhere, it is free everywhere." Enforcement of economic rights granted by national governments becomes very difficult, if not impossible. We already begin to see skirmishes between privacy rights and enforcement of copyright.
Third, despite the Constitution's grant of copyright to "authors", copyright has really not so much a protection of the author as it is of the distributors. As a general proposition authors do not make copies. Publishers do.
However, in our brave new world the author has the ability to directly offer copies. This is a fundamental change and it will have a great shakout over the next few decades. I doubt that a copyright system that has over the years grown to protect distribution is likely to survive without radical chnage a fundamental change in distribution.
Fourth, thanks to technological change, the Berne Convention, and greed, the public no longer knows what is or is not protected, how it is protected, and what they can do with it and remain "legal".
I have watched learned legal professors argue that the creator of a public message has copyright whether it is noted on the message or not, and consequently reposting is illegal -- an act engaged in several million times a year by normal citizens. Others argue that an implicit license is granted, despite a statute that requires transfer of rights to be in writing. A dozen other fundamental contradictions between the law and reality exist -- and the law is beginning to look like King Canute.
Proposed reforms of the copyright law to handle technological change complicate a law that needs simplification. Many of the proposals are barely cloaked greed -- at times we seem not far from a proposal that we add a line to the IRS 1040 to pay a tax for the benefit of authors, Hollywood moguls, and the larger news syndicates.
Finally, copyright has as one of its theses that users ought pay authors. Yet most "pay per use" models on the Internet seem to be failures (we can watch Time Warner and see). What seems to work best is a structure where there is very little expense between the creator and the user, and the creator's compensation comes from the ability to sell the user's interest. The very mechanism of distribution is often the encouragement of copying. This is not an economic model envisioned by copyright.
I think people ought be compensated for original work. I think copyright is an increasingly dysfunctional and impossibly expensive in transaction costs way to do so.
Perhaps we need a new Statute of Anne?
Regards,
John
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