The arrival of the Internet was revolutionary, and
one of the most tumultuous developments that flowed from
it--the upending of the relatively settled world of
copyright law--has forced us to completely rethink how
rights to a work are allocated and how delivery formats
affect an originator's claims to the work. Most of the
disputes swirling around novel Internet media delivery
systems, from Napster to Youtube to the Google Book
Project, derive from our views on what constitutes a
proper understanding of copyright. Who has the right to
a work, and to what extent should we protect a rights
holder's ability to derive income from it? Is it right
to make copyrighted works free of charge? One of the
central figures in this decade-plus long debate has been
William Patry, who is now the lead copyright attorney
for Google. In How to Fix Copyright, he offers a concise
and pithy set of solutions for improving our
increasingly outmoded copyright system. After outlining
how we arrived at our current state of dysfunction,
Patry offers a series of pragmatic fixes that steer a
middle course between an overly expansive interpretation
of copyright protection and abandoning it altogether.We
have to accept that we cannot force people to buy
copyrighted works, but at the same time, we have to
enforce laws against counterfeiting. Most importantly,
we have to look at the evidence--what furthers
creativity yet does not deny protection to those who
need it to create? We should also reject the
increasingly strident (and, he argues, ill-informed)
denunciations of delivery systems: Google Booksearch and
DVRs are merely technologies, and are not the problem.
Throughout, he stresses that we need to recognize that
the consumer is king. Law can only solve legal problems,
not business problems, and too often we use law to solve
business problems. Practical yet prescriptive, How to
Fix Copyright will reshape our understanding of what the
real problems actually are and help us navigate through
the increasingly complex dilemmas surrounding authorship
and rights in our digital age. |
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