What is Copyright? Copyright is often viewed as something complicated and hard to understand Copyright starts out simple, but gets more complex as exceptions are added for certain circumstances Computers and the Internet only made it worse Copyright law is better understood if you start at the beginning and build up

What is Copyright? The basic rule behind copyright is:

History of Copyright British Parliament enacts the Statute of Anne the first United States copyright law the Berne Convention, a unified copyright law, replaced need for registration in every European country the International Copyright Treaty was made by authors, publishers, and printers the Copyright Act of 1976 replaced all previous U.S. copyright laws

History of Copyright The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the term, complied with international copyright, and addressed technological developments Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights explores the National Information Infrastructure Working Group releases White Paper Digital Millennium Copyright Act protected ISP’s and prohibited circumvention of access control

History of Copyright Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act required that any device that reads, stores, or records digital information comply with copy protection schemes encoded in digital works

Technology vs. Copyrighted Material Just after the DMCA, the MP3 format was discovered The recording industry tried to stop it The recording industry was given a chance to create their own copy-protected format No copy-protected format ever developed Public got tired of waiting and started trading pirated MP3’s over the Internet

Technology vs. Copyrighted Material Companies made Internet equivalents to things legal in the real world, but found to be illegal on the Internet MP3.com - copying MP3’s from CD to computer Napster - sharing music iCraveTV - rebroadcasting by cable stations RecordTV.com - recording TV shows to watch later Scour.com and MP3Board.com - searching for information Each company tried to argue that what they were doing was legal, but lost to the content industry All they were doing was taking something legal in real life and putting it on the Internet

Technology vs. Copyrighted Material Why didn’t it work? The real world and the Internet have different geometries The real world: the distance between two points is a straight line The Internet: the distance between two points is a single mouse click When given a new world, old rules no longer work

As always, the PowerPoint Scrolling Credits™. Created by Jon Bettencourt Directed by Mr. PowerPoint, of course. See or for more information. Most knowledge gained from Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, available at your local library! Information was also used from the Copyright Timeline at The U.S. Copyright Office’s web site is at Hasta la pasta.