×
Via Tom, Rasmus Fleischer has a fascinating essay on copyright law, and the ways in which it's been confounded by the internet, over at Cato Unbound:
A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of texts, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover works, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined.This change has taken place because previously distinct media are now simulated within the singular medium of the Internet, and copyright law simply seems unable to cope with it. Consider radio broadcasting and record shops, which once were inherently different. Their online counterparts are known respectively as “streaming” and “downloading,” but the distinction is ultimately artificial, since the same data transfer takes place in each. The only essential difference lies in how the software is configured at the receiving end. If the software saves the music as a file for later use, it’s called a “download.” If the software immediately sends the music to the loudspeakers, it’s called “streaming.”But of course, you can then rip a stream -- a process pretty similar to taping, only it can be done on demand, and used to build a digital music library. Various corporations see the danger, and because they know they can't stay on top of every innovation, they try to criminalize the whole set of underlying tools and practices that lead to innovations. As Fleischer puts it, "This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last." So far, innovators have stayed ahead of corporate legislators. But there's no guarantee of how long they can do that.I know some folks find copyright issues a bit dull, but it's one of the few areas of the law where a couple bad policy decisions can significantly reduce the amount of awesome in your life. So read the essay. And notice that it says, at the bottom, "All Rights Reserved, ©2008 Cato Institute."
