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Zittrain: ''Calling Off the Copyright War''
Posted by Steven Wu on Monday, November 25 @ 23:55:55 EST Copyright
Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center has an editorial up in the Boston Globe entitled, "Calling Off the Copyright War."

In the editorial, Zittrain contrasts "the law of intellectual property as understood among sophisticated corporate intermediaries and the reality of intellectual property as experienced by the public." Zittrain's basic point is that, until recently, copyright law developed in two separate tracks: one, the increasingly complicated legal rules that corporations use to protect their ideas as property; and second, the increasingly loose and casual uses of ideas--even copyrighted ones--by private individuals and groups (for instance, Girl Scouts singing around the campfire). Recently, of course, the Internet and other advances in technology (including radio) have caused corporations to assert their own vision of copyright onto the ordinary public--with the result that corporations' arguments (and victories) often seem to contradict common sense. Zittrain proposes the need for a compromise between these two models, respecting both the corporations' profit-based property view of copyright and the common-sensical idea that ideas are free.

Unfortunately, there are no clear proposals of what that compromise would be: Zittrain ends with only a suggestion that ordinary people ought to make clear to the corporations that the common-sense notion of copyright is as important to the public as the property notion of copyright is to the corporations. The problem is that the two models seem so fundamentally contradictory--and believers on one side simply will not give ground to the other side because, well, it's wrong. It's a nice sentiment that Zittrain expresses; it's not as clear what policy will (or should) result.

 
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