3 - Copyright in the digital age
from Part One - Theoretical issues in media rights
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
Thomas Jefferson advanced the concept of libraries and the right to check out a book free of charge. But this great forefather never considered the likelihood that 20 million people might access a digital library electronically and withdraw its contents at no cost.
(Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, 1996: 4)Digital technology could enable an extraordinary range of ordinary people to become part of a creative process. To move from the life of a ‘consumer’ (just think about what that word means – passive, couch potato, fed) of music – and not just music, but film, and art, and commerce – to a life where one can individually and collectively participate in making something new.
(Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, 2001: 9)Introduction
The balancing act that copyright attempts to achieve between the author of a work and the circulation of information and cultural knowledge that we analysed in the previous chapter has come under increasing attack. As the citation above by Lawrence Lessig suggests, the turn in what some have called the ‘digital moment’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2001) and others have interpreted as the ‘digital dilemma’ (National Research Council, 2000) has collapsed the distinctions between media producers and media consumers. While the use and reuse of media in cultural creativity is not necessarily a new thing, from jazz to hip-hop, it is the ability of more and more people to create and disseminate their creative output which is new and potentially radical.
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- Media Rights and Intellectual Property , pp. 31 - 44Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2005