We’re living in a world faced by environmental problems, war, terrorism, economic problems, disease, injustice, and other problems. Why should you care about copyright or patent law or other areas of intellectual-property law and policy?
The answer is simple: the choices we make about our intellectual-property framework may shape how well we solve those other problems listed above — or even whether we can solve them at all.
Scientific Development
Take scientific development for example. New inventions are protected by patent law, and new scientific research is (when published) protected by copyright law. This means that unless there are balances built into the protection schemes for patents and copyrights, it may be harder for a future inventor or researcher to come up with the kinds of scientific and technical solutions our evolving culture needs. With patent law there are built-in limitations — patents don’t last forever, so after a couple of decades it becomes possible for an inventor to draw upon the work done by other inventors in the past without having to pay anybody to do so.
Artistic Production
There are supposed to be balances in copyright law as well, but over the last few decades, copyright holders have increasingly sought extensions of the terms of protection, as well as other legal frameworks, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that alter the balances of rights that our copyright law had built into it. It’s obvious, of course, that creative artists can be affected by too much protection of copyrighted works — the creativity of today’s artists may depend on their ability to borrow from or even transform the creative works of earlier artists. One recent example of this is the Disney movie “Treasure Planet” — a science-fictional retelling of a formerly copyrighted work (the novel TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stevenson).
Scientific Research
What may be less obvious is that too much copyright protection can hurt scientific research as well. For example, the publishers of scientific journals (which are typically low-circulation but have high subscription fees) typically enforce their copyrights vigorously, effectively putting a high sticker price on access to the research they publish. One initiative to correct this imbalance is the Open Access movement, which argues that publicly funded research ought to be made available to the public for free (or least inexpensively) some period after a scientific journal has published it (thus allowing the journal to recover its investment in publishing the research but also eventually allowing scientists to have access to that research without having to pay prohibitively large subscription fees).
Technological Development
There are other ways that too much protection — or the wrong kind of protection — of copyrighted works can harm the general public good. Some copyright holders, for example, have sought to have copyright protection built into general-purpose digital devices, such as personal computers. Pursuing legislation or regulation that does this may seem like a good idea in the short run, but its net effect is to choke innovation in personal computers — this in a period when we know that the digital revolution has vastly improved our productivity, our creativity, and our access to important information.
Civic Discourse
And even if too much protection were not bad technology policy, there’s no question that it’s bad social policy. Part of the Copyright Bargain — the deal that citizens have collectively made, through their lawmakers, with creators — is that citizens should be able to make certain kinds of unauthorized use of creative works, even during the period in which they are protected. (This is what enables a book reviewer to quote a book he disagrees with in a newspaper review, for example. It’s also what enables one candidate for public office to quote another’s written speech with impunity in the course of a heated election battle.) Certain kinds of legal and technological protection of copyrighted works hold the potential to make even “quoting” of creative works effectively impossible for ordinary citizens. We believe that such limitations on the ability to quote, or to “sample,” or to otherwise use the creative works of others without asking permission pose threats to the Copyright Bargain.
Free Speech
In open societies, such as the one we live in, we want to maximize everybody’s freedom to speak, to create, to learn, to invent, to ask critical questions. We believe that this freedom is going to be central to resolving the other problems we face in the this new century, and that we will face in the centuries to come. That’s why we are giving so much attention to copyright policy, patent policy, and other intellectual -property policy right now — because we don’t want to hobble our ability to use and reuse creative works in order to solve our problems. What we want instead is an intellectual-property framework that liberates us.
That kind of liberating framework must, of course, be a framework of suitable rewards and incentives for creators and inventors, for scientists and artists. But it also must be a framework that gives “breathing space” to the rest of us, so that we can draw upon the creative problem-solving and expressive speech of others to enhance our own problem-solving and creative expression. If we can strike the right balance in that framework, we’ll all be richer for it.
