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[FYI] (Fwd) FC: Excerpts available from new book "Digital Copyright"




------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Thu, 01 Mar 2001 20:50:52 -0500
To:             	politech@politechbot.com
From:           	Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject:        	FC: Excerpts available from new book "Digital Copyright"
Send reply to:  	declan@well.com


***********

Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 00:03:00 -0500
To: declan@well.com
From: Jonathan Weinberg <weinberg@mail.msen.com>
Subject: Jessica's new book

Declan --

         I want to let you know about Jessica's just-published book,
*Digital Copyright*.  Here's the blurb; longer excerpts are available
at <www.digital-copyright.com>.

Jon

Jonathan Weinberg
weinberg@msen.com



Digital Copyright
Jessica Litman (Professor of Law, Wayne State University)
Prometheus Books 2001
ISBN 1-57392-889-5
www.digital-copyright.com

The Internet has been hailed as the most revolutionary social
development since the printing press. In many ways its astonishing
growth has outstripped any historical analogy we can unearth. What has
fueled much of that growth has been the explosion of new possibilities
for connections -- among people, among different formerly discrete
packages of information, among ideas. Digital media and network
connections, it is said, are the most democratic of media, promoting
free expression and access to information wherever a computer can be
hooked up to a telephone line.

In this celebration of new possibilities, we tend to emphasize
the many things that become feasible when people have ready access to
information sources and to other people not practicably available
before. The scope and the speed of interconnected digital networks
make conversations easy that before were unimaginable. But the
technological marvel that makes this interconnection possible has
other potential as well. Digital technology makes it possible to
monitor, record and restrict what people look at, listen to, read and
hear. Why, in the United States, would one want to do such a thing? To
get paid. If someone, let's call him Fred, keeps track of what we see
and hear, that enables Fred to ensure that we pay for our sights and
sounds. Once information is valuable, an overwhelming temptation
arises to appropriate that value, to turn it in to cash.

Now that technology permits the dissemination of information
on a pay-per-view basis, we've seen the emergence of new way of
thinking about copyright: Copyright is now seen as a tool for
copyright owners to use to extract all the potential commercial value
from works of authorship, even if that means that uses that have long
been deemed legal are now brought within the copyright owner's
control. In 1998, copyright owners persuaded Congress to enhance their
rights with a sheaf of new legal and technological controls. Armed
with those copyright improvements, copyright lawyers began a concerted
campaign to remodel cyberspace into a digital multiplex and shopping
mall for copyright-protected material. The outcome of that effort is
still uncertain. If current trends continue unabated, however, we are
likely to experience a violent collision between our expectations of
freedom of expression and the enhanced copyright law.





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