The Future of Copyright

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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 entry was posted by T. Colin Dodd on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Truth, Democratizing Content, The Law, Copyright as a weapon, Copyright, Creative Commons, Open Standards, IP Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.