> > I think the core problem is that copyright is obsolete for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.
On 4/15/96, "Trotter Hardy" <thardy[_at_]facstaff.wm.edu> said:
>
> 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.
We are not really in disagreement on this point, are we?
> 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.
I realize that the polite fiction is to regard copyright as a way of seeing that authors are compensated for their creativity.
I think that almost any analysis will quickly show that the principal effect of copyright, and its driving force, is not to ensure that authors get compensation but to protect distributors of works.
Authors may benefit, but generally as a sort of trickle down beneficiary -- because we protected Mammoth Multimedia Company (apologies to Wodehouse) , Uncle Galahad got compensated for the publication of his memoirs.
"When everybody becomes a publisher" , as you put it, is a fundamental change in the underlying fabric. Uncle Galahad may not not need Mammoth--he can post his memoirs on alt.scandals.victorian. He can send everybody a .pdf file so we can print the book.
The mechanism by which Uncle Galahad is compensated is likley to be very much different. So should copyright law be.
Unfortunately, the political reality is that Mammoth Multimedia has more and better lobbyists than Uncle Galahad.
The cultural reality is that lawyers, who should be most instrumental in crafting these changes, tend to be technological sluggards and professional conservatives. In my opinion,' we lawyers also display less allegiance to "making good law" and more to making "law good for our clients" than ought be the case.
None of which bodes well for saying that the transition will be smooth.
This is, I think aptly illustrated by our adoption of the Berne Convention, or more specifically by moving away from the possibility of making copyright dependent on notice of copyright.
Most on line material is intended to be copied. In most cases the author wants his work to be disseminated and is not particulary concerned with monetary compensation. Both of us made public postings with that intent.
We adopted the Berne Convention ascon line material blossomed, The end result is that the law gets violated millions of times a year.
So far our principal reform of the last two decades has made an ass of the law. Are you confident that we will do better in the next decade?
I think that we have to do some radical rethinking about what it is we want the law to accomplish and how best to do that.
I think it has to be "radical". I do not think our best intellects developing finer and finer analogies of how the momentary storage of data on a router on the Internet, or the use of a proxy server, is like a printing press, will really get us to where we need to go.
Regards,
John
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