Filed under: Copyright
Last Thursday the New York Public Library held a debate titled, “The Battle Over Books“. It was video webcast live, unfortunately they screwed up and forget to disable the password protection on the stream, so you couldn’t get in until the end. They now have an audio only quicktime stream on the website. Or you can download here via bittorrent.
The participants included:
- Allan Alder - Association of American Publishers
- David Drummond - Google
- Lawrence Lessig - Stanford Law School and Creative Commons
- Nick Taylor - The Authors Guild
While it is an entertaining listen (once the NYPL guy at the beginning shuts up) it is at the same time very frustrating. The majority of the debate hovers above the issue that the opposing sides disagree on the terms of Fair Use. Is copying an entire book, putting it in a database fair use? Alder and Taylor say no, Drummond and Lessig say yes.
However, while terms of Fair Use is a big issue, it becomes clear from the debate that the fundamental issue is that Copyright law is broken. It may have worked alright with the protection of physical objects, but it does not map cleanly to the digital world. Lessig alludes to this on multiple occasions and outside the debate has at least attempted to suggest alternative solutions.
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Jared, you’re sounding more and more like a librarian. it’s cute.
P
Comment by Pam 11.29.05 @ 8:08 pm