Authorship, Incentives for Creation, and Copyright in the Digital 21st Century

Campbell, James Authorship, Incentives for Creation, and Copyright in the Digital 21st Century., 2006 . In 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), Austin (US), 3-8 November 2006. [Conference paper]

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English abstract

Copyright in the United States is under enormous stress in the digital age. The cause of this stress is often described in technological terms, yet there are deeper systemic policy and legal factors at play. Specifically, there is an ever-increasing, and increasingly obvious, disconnect between the constitutionally based justification for copyright, and copyright's lived out implementation. That is particularly true regarding two key justifications for the expansions of copyright protection that have occurred since 1790: the concept of the author, and the necessity of providing a high level of control and financial incentives to authors to encourage the production of socially valuable works. This paper examines both of these justifications for expanded copyright protection and finds them unproven and, in fact, significantly lacking force under both philosophical and empirical analysis. We suggest that the U.S. abandon those justifications for copyright in today's digital world. We offer eight principles upon which a more integrated and relevant copyright system could be based, one in which policy, law, and practice could be brought into coherence so that today's stresses on copyright would be minimized, and the Constitutional charge to promote "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" would be maximized for society as a whole.

Item type: Conference paper
Keywords: copyright law ; intellectual property
Subjects: E. Publishing and legal issues. > ED. Intellectual property: author's rights, ownership, copyright, copyleft, open access.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BC. Information in society.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BE. Information economics.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BF. Information policy
B. Information use and sociology of information > BG. Information dissemination and diffusion.
Depositing user: Norm Medeiros
Date deposited: 07 Dec 2006
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:05
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/8569

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