The arrival of the Internet was revolutionary, and one of the most tumultuous developments that followed—the upending of the relatively settled world of copyright law—has forced the complete rethink of how rights to a work are allocated and how delivery formats affect an originator's claims to the work. Most of the disputes around novel Internet media delivery systems derive from views on what constitutes a proper understanding of copyright. Who has the right to a work, and to what extent should we protect a rights holder's ability to derive income from it? Is it right to make copyrighted work ... More

The arrival of the Internet was revolutionary, and one of the most tumultuous developments that followed—the upending of the relatively settled world of copyright law—has forced the complete rethink of how rights to a work are allocated and how delivery formats affect an originator's claims to the work. Most of the disputes around novel Internet media delivery systems derive from views on what constitutes a proper understanding of copyright. Who has the right to a work, and to what extent should we protect a rights holder's ability to derive income from it? Is it right to make copyrighted works free of charge? This book offers solutions for improving an increasingly outmoded copyright system. After outlining how we arrived at the current state of dysfunction, the book offers a series of pragmatic fixes that steer a middle course between an overly expansive interpretation of copyright protection and abandoning it altogether. We cannot force people to buy copyrighted works, but at the same time we have to enforce laws against counterfeiting. Most importantly, we have to look at the evidence—what furthers creativity yet does not deny protection to those who need it to create? We should also reject the increasingly strident (and ill-informed) denunciations of delivery systems: Google Book search and DVRs are merely technologies, and are not the problem. The text stresses that we need to recognize that the consumer is king. Law can only solve legal problems, not business problems, and too often we use law to solve business problems.