Economics Dictionary of Arguments

Home Screenshot Tabelle Begriffe

 
Copyright: Copyright is a legal concept granting creators exclusive rights to their original works, such as writings, music, art, or software. It provides control over reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and public display of the work, protecting against unauthorized use. See also Authorship.
_____________
Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Yochai Benkler on Copyright - Dictionary of Arguments

Benkler I 439
Copyright/rights/Benkler: The first domain in which we have seen a systematic preference for commercial producers that rely on property over commons-based producers is in copyright. This preference arises from a combination of expansive interpretations of what rights include, a niggardly interpretive attitude toward users’ privileges, especially fair use, and increased criminalization.
1. Jessica Litman early diagnosed an emerging new “right to read.”(1) The basic right of copyright, to control copying, was never seen to include the right to control who reads an existing copy, when, and how
I 440
many times. Once a user bought a copy, he or she could read it many times, lend it to a friend, or leave it on the park bench or in the library for anyone else to read. This provided a coarse valve to limit the deadweight loss associated with appropriating a public good like information. As a happenstance of computer technology, reading on a screen involves making a temporary copy of a file onto the temporary memory of the computer. Owners should have the right to control all valuable uses of their works. Combined with the possibility and existence of technical controls on actual use and the DMCA’s prohibition on circumventing those controls, this means that copyright law has shifted. It has now become a law that gives rights holders the exclusive rights to control any computer-mediated use of their works, and captures in its regulatory scope all uses that were excluded from control in prior media.
2. Fair use in copyright was always a judicially created concept with a large degree of uncertainty in its application. (…) it is important to recognize that the theoretical availability of the fair-use doctrine does not, as a practical matter, help most productions. This is due to a combination of two factors: (1) fair-use doctrine is highly fact specific and uncertain in application, and (2) the Copyright Act provides
I 441
large fixed statutory damages, even if there is no actual damage to the copyright owner.
(…) in the past few years, even this uncertain scope has been constricted by expanding the definitions of what counts as interference with a market and what counts as a commercial use.
3. Copyright enforcement has also been substantially criminalized in the past few years. Beginning with the No Electronic Theft Act
I 442
(NET Act) in 1997 and later incorporated into the DMCA, criminal copyright has recently become much more expansive than it was until a few years ago. As criminal copyright law is currently written, many of the tens of millions using p2p [peer-to-peer] networks are felons. It is one thing when the recording industry labels tens of millions of individuals in a society “pirates” in a rhetorical effort to conform social norms to its members’ business model. It is quite another when the state brands them felons and fines or imprisons them. Litman has offered the most plausible explanation of this phenomenon.(2) As the network makes low-cost production and exchange of information and culture easier, the large-scale commercial producers are faced with a new source of competition- volunteers, people who provide information and culture for free. As the universe of people who can threaten the industry has grown to encompass more or less the entire universe of potential customers, the plausibility of using civil actions to force individuals to buy rather than share information goods decreases. Suing all of one’s intended customers is not a sustainable business model. In the interest of maintaining the business model that relies on control over information goods and their sale as products, the copyright industry has instead enlisted criminal enforcement by the state to prevent the emergence of such a system of free exchange.
4. The change in copyright law that received the most widespread public attention was the extension of copyright term in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
I 443
The inordinately long term of protection in the United States, initially passed under the pretext of “harmonizing” the length of protection in the United States and in Europe, is now being used as an excuse to “harmonize” the length of protection for various kinds of materials—like sound recordings—that actually have shorter terms of protection in Europe or other countries, like Australia.
5. A narrower, but revealing change is the recent elimination of digital sampling from the universe of ex ante permissible actions, even when all that is taken is a tiny snippet. The court (…) held that any digital sampling, no matter how trivial, could be the basis of a copyright suit. Such a bright-line rule that makes all direct copying of digital bits, no matter how small, an infringement, makes digital sound recordings legally unavailable for noncommercial, individually creative mixing.
>Copyright/Zittrain
, >Digital Millennium Copyright Act/DMCA/Benkler.

1. Jessica Litman, “The Exclusive Right to Read,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 13 (1994): 29.
2. Jessica Litman, “Electronic Commerce and Free Speech,” Journal of Ethics and Information Technology 1 (1999): 213.

_____________
Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.

Benkler I
Yochai Benkler
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom New Haven 2007


Send Link

Authors A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   Z  


Concepts A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   Z