June, 2008

Copyright and Innovation

by Timothy B. Lee
The Conversation
June 30th, 2008

The “business models” we should be concerned about are not only those concerned with the creation of music and movies, but also with the development of new technologies for manipulating sound and video. A copyright policy that gives content creators veto power over technological innovation may marginally deter file sharing (I have my doubts) but it will also dramatically affect the pace of innovation in digital media devices.

Read: Copyright and Innovation

Copyright’s Losers

by Tom W. Bell
The Conversation
June 26th, 2008

Perhaps copyright law can avoid favoring one art form over another. It cannot, however, avoid picking winners and losers.

Read: Copyright’s Losers

Picking Winners

by Doug Lichtman
The Conversation
June 24th, 2008

I think copyright law should do what it can to accommodate as many business models as plausible. So if new technology can lead to a rebirth of local live performances, copyright law should try to support those efforts. And if Paramount thinks that there is still room for the major motion picture even now, copyright law should again endeavor to leave that door open.

Read: Picking Winners

Movies: Major Art or Minor art?

by Rasmus Fleischer
The Conversation
June 24th, 2008

Any intelligent discussion about copyright and movies must carefully define what it is that the law should safeguard. Is it the artistic use of moving pictures in general, or is it the format of big-budget feature films under conditions established in the last century?

Read: Movies: Major Art or Minor art?

Suggestions for copyright reform, and reflections on music as service and product

by Rasmus Fleischer
The Conversation
June 22nd, 2008

While re-restricting copyright law to the regulation of commercial exploitation may be a step in the right direction, the definition of “commercial” is without doubt tending to become more and more blurred.

Read: Suggestions for copyright reform, and reflections on music as service and product

Social Norms, Technology, and Copyright Law

by Timothy B. Lee
The Conversation
June 20th, 2008

Every successful legal regime works in tandem with a set of social norms and economic constraints that do most of the heavy lifting. Laws against burglary work mostly because most people have internalized norms against theft, and because we all have locks on our doors. The actual anti-burglary laws just play clean-up, catching the rare individual who isn’t deterred by the locks or the social pressures. If we lived in a society in which no one had locks on their doors and most people thought burglary was OK, no conceivable set of legal sanctions could keep burglary under control.

There is evidence that that’s the world we’re heading toward with regard to copyright law.

Read: Social Norms, Technology, and Copyright Law

Towards a Copyriot Act — and Away from It, Again

by Tom W. Bell
Reaction Essay
June 16th, 2008

Put yourself in the shoes of a Hollywood executive. For decades, copyright served your industry well. You hawked expressive works, consumers calmly lined up to pay, and everybody seemed pretty happy about the results. Your long years in the business have seen American culture light up the planet. “What vases were to ancient Athens,” you say, “music, films, and TV are to Hollywood.”

Now, though, you see your cultural empire crumbling.

Read: Towards a Copyriot Act — and Away from It, Again

Nobody Puts Copyright in the Corner

by Doug Lichtman
Reaction Essay
June 14th, 2008

Copyright law and copyright policy are both in the midst of enormous change. That seems to bother Rasmus Fleischer and for reasons that I cannot understand. As Fleischer emphasizes in his lead essay, in recent years the technologies available to facilitate the creation and distribution of creative work have themselves undergone enormous change. Of course copyright law and policy are busily following suit.

Read: Nobody Puts Copyright in the Corner

Two Paths for Copyright Law

by Timothy B. Lee
Reaction Essay
June 11th, 2008

It is often supposed that giving individuals more freedom to share copyrighted materials with one another will amount to the abolition of copyright. But this is far from true. . . The copyright policies of the last decade have been based on the idea that copyright is about controlling unauthorized copying. An alternative is to treat copyright as a limitation on commercial exploitation of creative works. Under this option, individuals could make any non-commercial use they liked of copyrighted works, including sharing them with strangers on the Internet, without fear of legal consequences. Copyright law would focus on commercial entities, who are both easier to regulate and better equipped to deal with copyright law’s complexities.

Read: Two Paths for Copyright Law

The Future of Copyright

by Rasmus Fleischer
Lead Essay
June 9th, 2008

“How relevant is it to declare oneself to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted,” writes Rasmus Fleischer in this month’s Cato Unbound lead essay. Meanwhile, digital copying technologies continue to grow exponentially in storage capacity, to the point where a handheld device may soon be able to carry all music ever recorded and released. This threatens to make a mockery of copyright law, and those who support the extensions of current regime are fighting back. “Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses,” writes Fleischer, who predicts “seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules.”

Read: The Future of Copyright