A Funny Look at CopyRight Law

Image via WikipediaLawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford University. He has been very active in the movement that is advocating the improvements in the existing copyright laws. They worked well to protect the rights of owners of the copy rights in the past when the medium of transmission of information was paper based. Also, the "fair use doctrine" provided guidelines to legitimately incorporate original copy righted works into derivative literary works.

The quote from Lawrence Lessig's Remix web site:

For more than a decade, we’ve been waging a war on our kids in the name of the 20th Century’s model of “copyright law.” In this, the last of his books about copyright, Lawrence Lessig maps both a way back to the 19^th century, and to the promise of the 21^st. Our past teaches us about the value in “remix.” We need to relearn the lesson. The present teaches us about the potential in a new “hybrid economy” — one where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies. That future will benefit both commerce and community. If the lawyers could get out of the way, it could be a future we could celebrate.

Here in this video he is being interviewed by Colbert



The extension of old copyright laws to digital information is creating problem for the fair use of the information. Also, the owners of the information are protecting information by using Digital rights management software. This creates a very restricted environment even for the people who have legitimately purchased the information. For example when a ebook is installed on a computer through the DRM software then it can not be read on any other computer losing the portability that goes with a paper based book. The owner can not transfer this book to any other person like he/she can for a paper based book. In many instances the publishers allow time limited use of the ebooks while once a paper based book is purchased its owner own that book as long as the book can last.

Things get even more dicey when we deal with digital music and digital video. The infamous law suits by RIAA against the owners of illegal digital muisc is one of the examples. There is no doubt that there is lot of piracy is going on but their approach has not solved the problem of digital music piracy. In fact they have finally dropped the idea of filing the law suits against people. The rumour has it that major digital music vendors such as Apple and Amazon are going to sell DRM free music in the future.

It will be interesting to know on how long the ebook publishers will hang on to their approach of protecting digital ebooks becasue their approach has become a serious impediment in actually implementing the ebooks for elearning.

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