Re: A Radical Thesis

John Lederer:
>
> I think the core problem is that copyright is obsolete for
> the new media.

People have been saying that about copyright with every new tecnology that has come along. I think it's probably more accurate to say two things: First, if one thinks of "copyright" as "controlling the making of copies," then copyright will have trouble with the digital era. But copyright hasn't been so restricted in decades. Copyright really has evolved toward controlling the means of making money from works of authorship. Rights include not only "copying," but also "performing," "displaying," and so on. There's no reason copyright law can't similarly evolve in reaction to the Internet, as recent efforts to add a "right to transmit" to the act show.

Second, the reason so many people think that copyright is obsolete for new media has much less to do with copyright and new media then the fact that a new generation of people now has to think about copyright when they did not before. When only publishers published, they learned that they had to think about copyright. When everybody becomes a publisher, they all have to learn to think about copyright. Being told that one is affecting copyright in one's day-to-day life is indeed a great surprise to many, and it's certainly something new. But that's not copyright's fault. Nor does it mean that copyright is obsolete. It just means that that when people are first exposed to a legal regime that never had to know much about before, they don't like it and they assume that the legal regime must be the problem.

Trotter Hardy
<thardy[_at_]facstaff.wm.edu>

    Trotter Hardy / William & Mary / (804) 221-3826 Received on Mon Apr 15 1996 - 17:19:24 GMT