I'm giving a talk ("Copyright, the Web, and Innovation") for the North Bay Multimedia Association on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2004 from 6:30 PM – 9:00 PM at the Marin Community Foundation in Novato, CA.
There's nothing new about a copyright crisis: the ability to automatically reproduce work has been contentious since the Gutenberg Bible — and as recently as the mid-Eighties, when the Hollywood studios tried to outlaw the VCR, calling it "the Boston Strangler of the American film-industry."
Is it any wonder that the web, with its ability to move, organize and reproduce information without control or oversight, has precipitated another crisis? Course not.
What is a wonder is that any number of otherwise bright and well-meaning lawmakers, geeks and businesspeople are behaving as though the proper response to a collision between copyright and technology is limits on technology — imagine if recorded music had been "limited" to ensure that it didn't disrupt the sheet-music business! (It almost was — and recorded music was only rescued through a Hail Mary act of Congress that legitimized piano rolls in 1908)
Today, the notion that technology should "compromise" with rights-holders is a tremendous threat to the open Web. The recording industry is indiscriminately abusing copyright law to sue 70,000 American file-sharers into submission. The Hollywood companies are getting the FCC to regulate the basic components of the PC.
