A Quote by Lawrence Lessig
Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.
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We established a regime that left creativity unregulated. Now it was unregulated because copyright law only covered "printing." Copyright law did not control derivative work. And copyright law granted this protection for the limited time of 14 years.
Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.
Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation. This is the seductive lure of socialism. And I repeat: these two uses of the law are in direct contradiction to each other.
Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connections, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.
Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple in copyright law, and when it comes to music copyright, it's especially convoluted.
I think the reality is that copyright law has for a very long time been a tiny little part of American jurisprudence, far removed from traditional First Amendment jurisprudence, and that made sense before the Internet. Now there is an unavoidable link between First Amendment interests and the scope of copyright law. The legal system is recognizing for the first time the extraordinary expanse of copyright regulation and its regulation of ordinary free-speech activities.
We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.
What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.
Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.
The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.
I think intellectual property is more like land, and copyright violation is more like trespass. Even though you don't take anything away from the landowner when you trespass, most people understand and respect the laws that make it illegal. The real crime in copyright violation is not the making of the copies, it's the expropriation of the creator's right to control the creation.
If the law does not give you what you want, you can oppose the law, you can work to change the law, but you cannot ignore the law. So it is fundamental that the constitutions of every one of our member states are upheld and respected.
It is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one.
Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book, and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. What a Utopia! What a paradise this region would be.
I do not agree with the use of 'signing statements' to effectively act as a line-item veto, except when the President believes a law or a provision within a law is unconstitutional.In general, if a President signs a law, they are committing themselves to enforcing it. If they don't believe it should become a law, they should veto it.
Who should regulate the media? Who should control the press? The commentariat agonises, as if the choice was between state control through some autocratic press law or a new Press Complaints Commission redecorated with false teeth. But there is another way. Let journalists regulate themselves.... Let's have a little democracy in the media. Even in the Murdoch papers, the number of journalists who are irretrievably lawless and callous is quite small. Most of the disasters at the News of the World happened because its editors treated their staff in the style of Muammar Gaddafi.
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