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Copyrights are commonplace in our world. We continue our discussion on their purpose and current state.


  • Compulsory licenses
    • Required to be given by law
    • You can use it without permission so long as you pay
  • Term extensions
    • Berne Convention
      • Author’s life plus 50 years
      • Photos: 25 years from creation
      • Movies: 50 years from showing (or creation if never shown)
      • Can always go longer (i.e. author’s life + 70 years in the US)
    • Public good?
  • Napster
    • 1999 - Network Peer-to-peer file sharing software focused on sharing MP3’s
    • Copied from one computer to the next
    • Required a central server
    • Music became free-as-in-cost - high demand for streaming
  • Digital Rights Management
    • Software and/or hardware that uses encryption to limit reproduction and re-use of digital content
    • Difficult by nature of digital goods
    • “Defective by design” - Free Software Foundation
  • DMCA
    • Blocks anything that breaks DRM unless there is no other way to get to a work
    • Distributing anti-DRM is criminal
    • Section 1201 - librarian of congress exemptions
    • Safe harbor provision
    • Does this at all sound like Licensing of the Press Act?
    • Sony CD’s that made markers illegal…
    • Sony “root kits” - was anti-virus for it a section 1201 violation?
  • DeCSS
    • Program to remove DRM from DVD’s
    • Illegal under the DMCA
    • Lots creative ways to get around it - t-shirts, designs, songs, etc
      • Similar to how PGP got out of the United States
    • Similar thing happened to BluRay DRM
    • On-line DRM has the possibility of being more difficult
  • Streaming services stopped illegal downloads
    • Limewire, Kazza, Morpheus and other services all continued after Napster
    • The demand for large-scale access to a huge library of content continued
    • Eventually Netflix started streaming. Spotify got popular
    • People were willing to pay a reasonable amount (or listen to ads)
    • It was more convenient so that’s where they went
    • Widevine is the current major DRM implementation for many of these services
  • Disney plus - fracturing
    • Disney started buying up as many properties as it could manage
    • Disney has had its vault strategy
    • Low price to gain market share (“Dumping”)
    • Hulu and Netflix have their own content
    • Fractured landscape - more cost, more difficult
    • Drive users toward other means?
  • What are today’s challenges
    • Today’s laws benefit publishers to the determent of the public and even, in some cases, to the artist
      • Prince and his name
      • Unable to create new derivative works - slows the growth of the “useful arts”
      • Over 99.9% of value is already captured according to Lawrence Lessig
      • Orphaned works
    • How do we create a new Statute of Anne?
      • New law or reform
      • Need to re-focus on the balance of the public vs the author
      • Shorter term, better predictability
      • Need to deal with the “Mickey Mouse” problem
      • Should focus on empowering the artist, not the publisher ___

References

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