At present copyright subsists in “”works” and copyright is the exclusive right to copy or perform the “”work”. The right includes a right to go to court to stop others copying or performing the work, to deliver up any profits made and damages.
Works are broadly categorised as literary (anything written, not necessarily of literary merit); artistic, musical, photographic and cinematographic. Copyright will also protect three dimensional things in sculpture and architecture.
Notice, there are two essential elements: copying and works.
In the past three decades, copyright law has belatedly dealt with easy copying of records on to audio tape; copying of paper by photocopiers and of film through video tape. More recently it has dealt with copying of computer programs in business, but household piracy is still rampant.
Now computer technology and the information highway threatens to make present copyright law obsolete. This is because the new technology is not only another in a long line of easier methods of copying things, but also because it fundamentally changes the other essential element of copyright law: works.
No longer do we have literary works, and musical works and artistic works. With computer technology everything can be digitised, from Beethoven’s Fifth to Madonna; from Blue Poles to a kindergarten daubing; from Casablanca to Star Wars. This is part of what computer and IT buffs call convergence. Moreover, the digitised form can be sent over the phone lines and copied exactly, so there is no progressive loss of quality as with analogue copying.
Many home computers have sound cards which play audio CDs and programs that can create, edit and record music on write-to disks and literary works are very easy to copy.
Many home computers have modems and can download material over the phone lines. Copying a three-minute pop song from a bulletin board is within the grasp of many. Receiving any length of video over the phone line is at present out of reach, but no doubt that technological barrier will fall before long.
The Recording Industry Association of America, which groups the major US recording companies, set up an anti-piracy task force after seeing how easy it is to put sound recordings on bulletin boards or even on Internet, the global network of 20 million people. Why go to the music store when you can get your CDs over the phone line?
The Federal Justice Department has set up the Copyright Convergence Group to look at the issue.
Somehow society has to ensure that decent rewards are paid for artistic creativity, or there will be less of it.
I suspect the solution is more likely to be technical rather than legal. Certainly the adage “”if it is worth copying it is worth protecting” goes out the window. You may copy a computer file with great strings of 1s and 0s, but will not know whether it was worth copying until a computer program translates it into a usable form.
This is where the technical solution comes in. The bulletin boards could provide samplers _ for example the first 30 seconds of the Madonna hit or the first three chapters of the latest Great Australian Mystery Novel. If you want the rest you have to log back in and electronically agree to a debit to your credit card for whatever the amount is before you can download the rest. The file would be a coded “”move-only, no-copy” file that can only be moved from one computer to another _ a bit like a CD.
This works to some extent with shareware computer software. People download it and use it. If they like it they pay $25 for registration, on an honour system, which will entitle them to cheap future upgrades.
There may be other solutions. These sorts of solutions have come about because traditional legalistic solutions are too far behind the technology or too expensive to invoke. One thing is for sure, the present rigid, legalistic definition of “”works” is not long for this world.
Footnote: there is no attribution for the ideas above. As Sir Owen Dixon said, “”Stealing from one author is plagiarism; stealing from three authors is research.”