Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, Prometheus, $25, ISBN
1573928895
THE digital era has already changed copyright law forever, says Jessica
Litman, in Digital Copyright.
Traditionally, in the US at least, the law has given personal and
non-commercial users free access to copyright material. Now rights holders are
demanding that every use be potentially chargeable, even the copy made briefly
in your computer鈥檚 memory when you read a Web page.
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They have backed up their position with a wave of copy protection
technologies and lawsuits, the most recent of which resulted in a ruling against
the music-sharing service Napster.
Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University in Michigan, is not calm
about this. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2000 conference, she
recommended a widespread campaign of civil disobedience against copyright
holders. In this book, she suggests that this is inevitable even if there is no
organised campaign. That鈥檚 what happens, she says, when you try to force
millions of people to obey laws they do not believe in.