As many observers have pointed out in recent years, U.S. copyright law is broken. With unreasonable copyright extensions and restrictions on distribution based on antiquated models, the courts are going to be clogged with intellectual property cases for the foreseeable future if the laws aren't changed for the digital era. Stanford researcher Zohar Efroni has an interesting proposal for changing U.S. copyright, describing a "more painful surgery" to the existing legislation.
As Efroni notes, his proposal doesn't seek to abolish existing laws, but restructure them:
"A digital society that strongly relies on network communication needs a new legal apparatus of exclusive rights and limitations to those rights. That system should be based on a new set of assumptions, concepts and positive regulation. Most importantly, it would be crucial to abandon formulations that focus on notions of reproduction, distribution of copies, public performance etc. One ramification of my proposal would be the elimination of the distinction between copy-related and noncopy-related rights. I posit that the exclusive rights must be rewritten, and since some of the key concepts and vocabulary do not yet exist under the present law - they should be 'invented.'"
Without access to Zefroni's study, which he describes as the result of four years of research into copyright law, I spoke with Evan Brown, Chicago Lawyer and Editor in Chief of Internet Cases. Brown admits that:
"...the notion of a right of "access" to apparently underlie the copyright paradigm is intriguing. It does shake at one's foundations of knowledge about copyright law to think of exclusive rights as being other than those we're accustomed to dealing with, e.g., the right to copy, distribute, make derivitave works, etc."
The idea that copyright would somehow shift the focus to the user is difficult to comprehend, and Brown also wonders how this new model would affect the rights of the work's creator. The driving force behind copyright has always been protecting the creator to encourage the creation of new work. Without a similar level of protection, will the content creators still have that same motivation in this new model?
Hopefully, Efroni will release more details of his study online. After all, it's all about the access to information.
Photograph of "Modern Book Printing" from the Berlin Walk of Ideas by Lienhard Schulz. Used under the GNU Free Documentation license
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Comments
Hey thanks for the quote. Very intriguing topic to say the least. Thanks for bringing it to light.
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