IP: new book on Digital Copyright

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 15:43:45 -0500
> To: dave () farber net
> From: Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg () mail msen com>
> Subject: new book on Digital Copyright
>
> Dave --
>
>         IP readers may be interested in a new book, *Digital Copyright*, 
> just published by Jessica Litman; excerpts are available at 
> <www.digital-copyright.com>.  (Full disclosure: Professor Litman, in 
> addition to being one of the country's leading experts on copyright law, 
> is also married to me.  The book is nonetheless terrific and, I think, 
> important.)
>
> Jon
>
>
> Jonathan Weinberg
> Professor of Law, Wayne State University
> weinberg () msen com
>
>
> Digital Copyright
> Jessica Litman (Professor of Law, Wayne State University)
> Prometheus Books 2001
> ISBN 1-57392-889-5
> www.digital-copyright.com
>
> The Internet has been hailed as the most revolutionary social
> development since the printing press. In many ways its astonishing
> growth has outstripped any historical analogy we can unearth.
> What has fueled much of that growth has been the explosion of
> new possibilities for connections -- among people, among different
> formerly discrete packages of information, among ideas. Digital
> media and network connections, it is said, are the most democratic of
> media, promoting free expression and access to information wherever a
> computer can be hooked up to a telephone line.
>
> In this celebration of new possibilities, we tend to emphasize
> the many things that become feasible when people have ready access
> to information sources and to other people not practicably available
> before. The scope and the speed of interconnected digital networks
> make conversations easy that before were unimaginable. But the
> technological marvel that makes this interconnection possible has
> other potential as well. Digital technology makes it possible to
> monitor, record and restrict what people look at, listen to, read and
> hear. Why, in the United States, would one want to do such a thing?
> To get paid. If someone, let's call him Fred, keeps track of what we
> see and hear, that enables Fred to ensure that we pay for our sights
> and sounds. Once information is valuable, an overwhelming temptation
> arises to appropriate that value, to turn it in to cash.
>
> Now that technology permits the dissemination of information
> on a pay-per-view basis, we've seen the emergence of new way of
> thinking about copyright: Copyright is now seen as a tool for
> copyright owners to use to extract all the potential commercial value
> from works of authorship, even if that means that uses that have
> long been deemed legal are now brought within the copyright owner's
> control. In 1998, copyright owners persuaded Congress to enhance
> their rights with a sheaf of new legal and technological controls.
> Armed with those copyright improvements, copyright lawyers began
> a concerted campaign to remodel cyberspace into a digital multiplex
> and shopping mall for copyright-protected material. The outcome of
> that effort is still uncertain. If current trends continue unabated,
> however, we are likely to experience a violent collision between our
> expectations of freedom of expression and the enhanced copyright law.
>
> Table of Contents
>
> Introduction
> 1. Copyright Basics
> 2. The Art of Making Copyright Laws
> 3. Copyright and Compromise
> 4. A Thought Experiment
> 5. Choosing Metaphors
> 6. Copyright Lawyers Set Out to Colonize Cyberspace
> 7. Creation and Incentives
> 8. "Just Say Yes to Licensing!"
> 9. The Bargaining Table
> 10. The Copyright Wars
> 11. Copyright Law in the Digital Millennium
> 12. Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age
> 13. The Copyright Bargain



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