Public Hearing On Intellectual Property Issues Involved In The National Information Infrastructure Initiative

This now famous White Paper provides rules for our digital highway.Ó Examines each of the major areas of intellectual property law, focusing primarily on copyright law & its application & effectiveness, especially subject matter & scope of protection, copyright ownership, term of protection, exclusive rights, limitations on exclusive rights, copyright infringement. Holds Internet service providers legally accountable for copyright & other infringements by their users. Judges are beginning to use this document to form case law.

Professor Litman's work stands out as well-researched, doctrinally solid, and always piercingly well-written.-JANE GINSBURG, Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property, Columbia UniversityLitman's work is distinctive in several respects: in her informed historical perspective on copyright law and its legislative policy; her remarkable ability to translate complicated copyright concepts and their implications into plain English; her willingness to study, understand, and take seriously what ordinary people think copyright law means; and her creativity in formulating alternatives to the copyright quagmire. -PAMELA SAMUELSON, Professor of Law and Information Management; Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, University of California, BerkeleyIn 1998, copyright lobbyists succeeded in persuading Congress to enact laws greatly expanding copyright owners' control over individuals' private uses of their works. The efforts to enforce these new rights have resulted in highly publicized legal battles between established media and new upstarts.In this enlightening and well-argued book, law professor Jessica Litman questions whether copyright laws crafted by lawyers and their lobbyists really make sense for the vast majority of us. Should every interaction between ordinary consumers and copyright-protected works be restricted by law? Is it practical to enforce such laws, or expect consumers to obey them? What are the effects of such laws on the exchange of information in a free society?Litman's critique exposes the 1998 copyright law as an incoherent patchwork. She argues for reforms that reflect common sense and the way people actually behave in their daily digital interactions.This paperback edition includes an afterword that comments on recent developments, such as the end of the Napster story, the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing, the escalation of a full-fledged copyright war, the filing of lawsuits against thousands of individuals, and the June 2005 Supreme Court decision in the Grokster case.Jessica Litman (Ann Arbor, MI) is professor of law at Wayne State University and a widely recognized expert on copyright law.

This book is based on the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference which reports on research into telecommunications policy issues. While the conference is now a respectable 23 years old, this is only the second printed edition of selected papers. A new law, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, accelerated the process of integration in the communication industry and made major revisions to the Communications Act of 1934 that increase the incentive for integration within the industry. Although the papers in this volume were written prior to the passage of the new law, their importance is merely enhanced by it. They deal with fundamental, complex policy problems that arise when previously separate segments of the telecommunications industry are integrated, rather than specific regulatory rules that are likely to be changed under the new law. With the passage of this law, the timeframe for developing appropriate policies for an integrated industry has been shortened. Changes expected to occur over a period of several years will now likely occur much more rapidly. These papers provide insights to help guide the transition in the industry. Divided into five parts, this volume: * deals with problems of transforming local exchange telephone service from a monopoly in each geographical area to an interconnected competitive network of networks, * considers the pricing problems that arise in an integrated network carrying traffic of different types across multiple service providers, * examines the problem of achieving interoperability in complex networks, * considers issues of intellectual property that arise in expected integrated networks of the future, and * discusses electronic publication of scholarly journals, copyright protection, and the applicability of copyright law in the digital age.