The New York Times Copyright and Copying Wrongs: A Web Rebalancing Act
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"The MP3.com verdict seems to underscore a mismatch between the intentions of traditional copyright law — to strike a balance between the rights of owners and the interests of users — and its effect in the Internet era.

As books and movies follow music from the physical to the digital realm, some legal experts argue that a new balance must be struck between copyright holders and the users of their works if copyright is to continue to drive economic and creative development.

"As these cases and others like them get sorted out we will learn to what extent copyright law is being interpreted to give the owners of content an indirect monopoly over the development of useful consumer information technologies," said Peter Jaszi, a law professor at American University. "That's really the stake in both of these cases.""

redux [06.15.00]
Business 2.0 Semantics of the New Economy
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the ’90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May. "

""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers…not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."

Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They’re yours–they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And ‘intellectual property’ is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."

"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."

redux [04.15.00]
MIT Technology Review Freedom—Or Copyright?
"Once upon a time, in the age of the printing press, an industrial regulation was established for the business of writing and publishing. It was called copyright. Copyright’s purpose was to encourage the publication of a diversity of written works. Copyright’s method was to make publishers get permission from authors to reprint recent writings.

Ordinary readers had little reason to disapprove, since copyright restricted only publication, not the things a reader could do. If it raised the price of a book a small amount, that was only money. Copyright provided a public benefit, as intended, with little burden on the public. It did its job well—back then.

Then a new way of distributing information came about: computers and networks. The advantage of digital information technology is that it facilitates copying and manipulating information, including software, musical recordings and books. Networks offered the possibility of unlimited access to all sorts of data—an information utopia.

But one obstacle stood in the way: copyright. Readers who made use of their computers to share copyright infringers. The world had changed, and what was once an industrial regulation on publishers had become a restriction on the public it was meant to serve."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."

redux [05.16.00]
Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days — the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."