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the copyright debates
This briefing, currently under development, points to some
of the more thoughtful - or merely more provocative -
online writings about copyright in the digital
environment.
The separate Intellectual Property guide
covers legislation, organisations and particular issues.
It also points to major government reports and to offline
writing by lawyers, authors, information technology
specialists, publishers and others.
copyright in the digital dominion
William
Strong's Copyright in the New World of Electronic
Publishing (Strong)
is cogent advocacy by a US publisher. While predating the
US Digital Copyright Millennium Act it remains of value.
A follow-up article
on Copyright in a Time of Change several
years later argued that much thinking about the shape of
digital copyright was premature, urging a flexible
approach that accommodates market experiments.
Janet Fisher's Copyright: The Glue of the System (Glue)
is similarly thoughtful. Charles Clark's In What are We
Trading? Authors' Rights & Publishers' Rights in
Traditional & Digital Media (PDF),
a paper in the July 1999 Learned Publishing and
his Net Law 5: A Cyberspace Agenda for
Publishers (PDF)
offer other publisher perspectives.
In the opposing corner is John Perry Barlow, responsible
for the zany A Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace (DIC)
...
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of
flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of
Mind.... I declare the global social space we are
building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies
you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to
rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we
have true reason to fear
and
The Economy of Ideas: Selling Wine Without Bottles on
the Global Net (EoI).
Information, it seems, like the proletariat, is everywhere
enslaved but throws off its chains when exposed to the
internet.
Barlow's recently updated his manifesto with an article
on The Next Economy of Ideas: After The Copyright
Revolution. Margaret Chon's 1996 Oregon Law Review
paper
on New Wine Bursting From Old Bottles: Collaborative
Internet Art, Joint Works & Entrepreneurship was
one of the more thoughtful elaborations from the
technolibertarians.
Esther Dyson, George Gilder and others penned the
Barlow-style 1994 Cyberspace and the American Dream: A
Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age (Dream),
another digital manifesto that's part Newt Gingrich, part
Robert Heinlein with a sprinkle of Daniel Bell and a
splash of Fritz Machlup.
Dyson's Intellectual Value, a 1995 article
in WIRED, argues that copyright owners will give away
their intellectual property and instead charge for
services. All very well if you're a Grateful Deadhead or
consultant but not, we think, a practical prescription for
most investors or creators.
As in our Digital guide, we suggest instead Christine
Borgman's lucid First Monday article
on The Premise & Promise of A Global Information
Infrastructure, drawn from her recent From
Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access
To Information in the Networked World (Cambridge, MIT
Press 00), and The Social Life of Information
(Boston, Harvard Business School Press 00) by John Seely
Brown & Paul Duguid. Pamela Samuelson's 1999 article
on Copyright & Censorship: Past As Prologue
explores the potential conflict between free speech and
copyright.
publishers and public access
Few
copyright owners want a total restriction on their
property. With rare exceptions, such as those described by
Iain Hamilton's In Search Of J D Salinger (London,
Heinemann 88), most authors and publishers want people to
read their texts or access other property of the mind.
Their concerns relate to respect for their authorship - eg
acknowledgement that they're the creator - and/or
appropriate remuneration ('information just wants to be
free' conflicts with the notion that 'authors just want to
eat'). Pricing is thus a critical question.
Michael Binder's paper
Licensing Models: Information as a Commodity
outlines approaches to online licensing. Colin Day's 1995
JEP paper
Economics of Electronic Publishing and Pricing
Electronic Products paper
complements the studies by Andrew Odlyzko noted in our
e-publishing guide.
Scott Bennett's Authors'
Rights questioned how authors have
benefited from copyright in the past and how they might
fare in the future. Laura Fillmore's Slaves of a New
Machine: Exploring the For-Free/For-Pay Conundrum (Slaves)
explored questions of pricing and access in the mid-1990s,
building on her JEP paper
on Online Publishing and paper
on Internet Publishing in a Borderless Environment:
Bookworms into Butterflies.
From within the academy Carol Risher's 1996 paper
Libraries, Copyright & the Electronic Environment,
identified some of the difficult questions. Pamela
Samuelson, highlighting suggestions that the legal
foundation for much online publishing may be contract
rather than copyright law, asked
Does Information Really Want To Be Licensed,
proving a response
from publisher Mark Rambler.
Branko Gerovac & Richard Solomon's paper
Protect Revenues, Not Bits: Identify Your Intellectual
Property is a landmark in US writing about online
publishing, pricing and copyright.
the academy
Stanley
Chodorow's paper
The Faculty, the University & Intellectual Property
provides an overview of US debate about copyright within
universities and research institutions.
The US National Initiative for a Networked Cultural
Heritage (NINCH) has been holding a series of valuable and
wide ranging 'Town Meetings' on copyright. Information
about the current series is here;
the report
on the 97-99 meetings is also available.
We'll be adding to this page in coming weeks.
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