P#2 Copyright Law, A thing of the past?

				         

	The dawn of the information age and the twenty-first century is going to
call for society to examine it's current policies governing the protection
of intellectual property. The current system of copyright protection may be
antiquated in light of the new mediums of communication. What we are legally
capable of doing with the wealth of ideas that we obtain through the
electronic medium is quite limited. I ran across many of the restrictions
governing the use of electronic mediums of communication at the WWW site
http://199.104.22.6/web
/alnor/software
.html#webpage. These restrictions
protect the originator of the idea so that he or she will receive credit for
the idea that they originated whether it be through recognition or monetary
compensation. These laws of "protection" seem to treat an idea in the
electronic medium, whether it be an HTML script, program code or email
message as if they were tangible physical items. This is what we, the
pioneers of the information age, are going to be left to define. Are our
laws of idea protection antiquated or can they find a home as the governing
body of a new medium? If these methods do not apply to the information age
how are we going to reform them?
	The copyright restrictions that we are currently governed by come from a
time, as Barlow put it, in which "the bottle was protected, not the wine."
Barlow also says that the value of something "was in the conveyance and not
the thought conveyed." In the information age this is not exactly a truth.
While there may be some value in a CD the actual value is in what it
conveys, the program code. Barlow predicts that in time even this method in
which the thought was conveyed, the compact disc, will disappear. Thus the
physical manifestation of an idea will no longer exist, the symbolic bottle
will be no more. If information runs around the web much like thought,
without physical manifestation, as Barlow mentions how will we place a value
on the content of an idea? Since time began, monetary value has been derived
from something tangible. What will we do without a method of conveyance for
an idea? This evolution to the point in which the container of an idea is no
longer tangible has the potential to recreate society and it's value system.
Barlow uses a lamentation by Thomas Jefferson to preface his article. In it
Jefferson states that once a man has divulged one of his ideas it forces
itself into the possession of everyone who wants it. Jefferson says that by
sharing an idea its originator is not losing anything but only allowing
another to come into possession of it. This approaches ideas from a
different viewpoint from current society. Presently when a person divulges
an idea he sees it as a loss, when that loss is made the person expects
compensation. Jefferson sees the same thing as a gain. Instead of viewing
idea sharing as a personal loss he sees it as a gain for society. In a
society that is going to see its ideas bounce around the internet like
thought moves through the human brain this Jeffersonian outlook may shape
our society. The utopian idea of Jefferson that suggests that ideas are not
property is taking hold among the masses. Software "piracy" runs rampant,
tons of people are running software on their computer systems that is
unlicensed and thus illegal, but this illegal use of software is extremely
difficult to cut down on. According to the web page I referenced earlier it
is actually illegal to reproduce someone's email message or save their HTML
page. Both are protected as intellectual property and are in effect
"copyrighted." But we do this anyway, our mail clients and web browsers even
have functions that allow us to take part in these "illegal" activities. It
is clear the direction that society is taking, no matter how the law tries
to stop it we are moving towards a society that promotes the free exchange
of ideas in the Jeffersonian model. Even if it is illegal, why should I not
let my friend install Office 97 to his computer with my disc, after all I am
not losing anything. The case can be made that the software publisher is
losing money. This may be true but by having it's product on someone's
computer they may have created a new market for themselves that may in fact
be more lucrative. View piracy rates in 1995 at
http://www.bsa.org/pi
racy/piracy_stu
dy95/piracy95.htm and there is an
obvious trend that information is going to be shared among the "common man."
	Where does law go in the face of these trends? Do we support old
conventions of property protection or do we dare to say that an idea should
be shared freely? These decisions are hard to make. We can go into a era in
which conventional copyright laws are enforced and we devise methods to
crack down on illegal property piracy on the internet. Or we can adopt a
more "laissez faire" attitude in which we get rid of the conventions that
are currently in place instead of just ignoring them. These are our choices
to make. An argument can be made for both cases, after all if one creates
something why shouldn't he own it? But, in a society of free information we
may be able to accomplish more and place more emphasis on humanity itself
and not levels of status that currently accompany it.
	The direction that we are moving in seems to defy what we as humans have
wanted in the past, recognition. Yet, the attitude of sharing software and
other electronic media are rooted in the humanistic quality of selfishness.
We are taking this software and not realizing that we are taking an idea.
Because this idea is not manifested physically we don't even think of paying
for it. Thus we have a paradox, the old idea of giving recognition and
compensation to a person with an idea is running head first into the new
idea of the free exchange of information. This paradox is difficult to sort
out because we want both free exchange and to maintain a system of
protection in order to give recognition. Where do we go from here? It seems
that the future and the technology of the information age may define this
question for us. It may now be out of our hands. These answers are at the
mercy of where technology is taking us as a human race. As technology
changes our lives it is probable that technology will change our outlook on
life. The answer to the original question of how we are going to reform
copyright law may not have an answer, copyright as we now know it may be a
thing of the past.