Businessday.co.za has an article about how copyright holders could fight back this year. Having lost the control because of filesharing networks on the internet the past year, this might be the year when they take control again.
Well that's what they think, I think it will be year of how to trick the authorities and the year of new technologies that will make filesharing/copying easier.
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and theorist of the digital society, has seized on the case to challenge the recent course of US copyright law, which has expanded the scope and duration of copyright at the expense of public access to works. |
He filed the lawsuit on behalf of Eric Eldred, who wanted to compile an electronic archive of unusual and out-of-print works online but was prevented from posting some works by a 1998 law extending the term of copyright protection.
Lessig argues congress has exceeded its constitutional authority by repeatedly extending the term of copyrights 11 times in the past 40 years. The 1998 law alone extended copyright by 20 years: works copyrighted by individuals since 1978 were granted a term of 70 years beyond the life of the author; works made by or for corporations were protected for 95 years. The extension applied to existing works even if the author was dead or the work long out of print.
For Lessig, these extensions violate the command of the constitution to congress that it "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
In my humble opinion the best way to make it all stop is to combine two things, lower the prices and make it as hard as possible to copy/distribute. Because when the prices are low, and you have to do a lot of work to get them for free, why not buy them.
If things are available for free, and the prices are low then some people still don't think about spending money on it, so the only solution is to make it worth buying by making it hard to get it for free. Hmm uhm are you still with me ?
Source: Businessday.co.za
