Book People Archive

[Fwd: [RRE]Digital Copyright]

I wondered if this issue of the RRE newsletter would be of interest to
this list?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [RRE]Digital Copyright
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 19:24:39 -0800
From: Phil Agre <pagre@[redacted]>
To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" <rre@[redacted]>


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Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 21:35:24 -0500
From: Jessica Litman <litman@[redacted]>

[...]

Digital Copyright
Jessica Litman
Prometheus Books 2001
ISBN 1-57392-889-5
www.digital-copyright.com

        The Internet has been hailed as the most revolutionary social
development since the printing press.  In many ways its astonishing
growth has outstripped any historical analogy we can unearth.
What has fueled much of that growth has been the explosion of
new possibilities for connections -- among people, among different
formerly discrete packages of information, among ideas.  Digital
media and network connections, it is said, are the most democratic of
media, promoting free expression and access to information wherever a
computer can be hooked up to a telephone line.

        In this celebration of new possibilities, we tend to emphasize
the many things that become feasible when people have ready access
to information sources and to other people not practicably available
before.  The scope and the speed of interconnected digital networks
make conversations easy that before were unimaginable.  But the
technological marvel that makes this interconnection possible has
other potential as well.  Digital technology makes it possible to
monitor, record and restrict what people look at, listen to, read and
hear.  Why, in the United States, would one want to do such a thing?
To get paid.  If someone, let's call him Fred, keeps track of what we
see and hear, that enables Fred to ensure that we pay for our sights
and sounds.  Once information is valuable, an overwhelming temptation
arises to appropriate that value, to turn it in to cash.

        Now that technology permits the dissemination of information
on a pay-per-view basis, we've seen the emergence of new way of
thinking about copyright: Copyright is now seen as a tool for
copyright owners to use to extract all the potential commercial value
from works of authorship, even if that means that uses that have
long been deemed legal are now brought within the copyright owner's
control.  In 1998, copyright owners persuaded Congress to enhance
their rights with a sheaf of new legal and technological controls.
Armed with those copyright improvements, copyright lawyers began
a concerted campaign to remodel cyberspace into a digital multiplex
and shopping mall for copyright-protected material.  The outcome of
that effort is still uncertain.  If current trends continue unabated,
however, we are likely to experience a violent collision between our
expectations of freedom of expression and the enhanced copyright law.


Table of Contents
             
Introduction
1. Copyright Basics
2. The Art of Making Copyright Laws
3. Copyright and Compromise
4. A Thought Experiment
5. Choosing Metaphors
6. Copyright Lawyers Set Out to Colonize Cyberspace
7. Creation and Incentives
8. "Just Say Yes to Licensing!"
9. The Bargaining Table
10. The Copyright Wars
11. Copyright Law in the Digital Millennium
12. Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age
13. The Copyright Bargain


[Moderator: Chapter 2 of the book (which I assume was provided
 as a sample chapter) followed in the post as sent to me.
 It's very interesting reading, but since it's rather long, and this
 thread is large already, I'll just direct interested readers to
 http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2001/RRE.Digital.Copyright.html
 for the full post.   Posters are free to comment on and
 quote from this sample chapter in followups if they wish.  (The post
 I'm forwarding after this one, for instance, cites Littman's
 book at one point.) - JMO]