Copyright is at once an engine of free expression and impediment to free expression. Copyright law underwrites much literature, journalism, music, art, and film. Yet copyright often stands in the way of speech that would build upon existing expression to convey new messages and artistic perspectives.
In a seminal 1970 article, Melville Nimmer, the leading copyright and First Amendment scholar of his day, aptly termed the copyright‐free speech conflict a “largely ignored paradox.” Yet today that conflict has come virulently to the fore, and copyright is increasingly chastised as a tool of private censorship.
Why has that happened? What values and practices does the copyright‐free speech conflict put at stake? How should the conflict be resolved?
These are the principal questions this book seeks to answer. This book explores the copyright‐free speech conflict as it cuts across traditional and digital media alike. In so doing, it juxtaposes the dramatic expansion of copyright holders' proprietary control against individuals' newly found ability to digitally cut, paste, edit, remix, and distribute popular sound recordings, movies, TV programs, graphics, and texts the world over. It tests whether, in light of these developments and others, copyright still serves as a vital engine of free expression and assesses how copyright does—and does not—burden speech. Taking First Amendment values as its lodestar, the book argues that copyright should be delimited by how it can best promote robust debate and expressive diversity, and it presents a blueprint for how that can be accomplished.
/index.html> (calling for formalization of Internet self-governance). 3. Since its inception, the Internet domain name system has been administered by the United States government through contract. In June 1998, the Clinton Administration announced that, as part of its overall policy of promoting Internet self-regulation, it would turn over responsibility for such administration to a new nonprofit corporation.
The World Intellectual Property Organization General Assembly adopted the Development Agenda in September 2007, after three years of acrimonious debate. The Agenda radically transforms WIPO's mandate and reverberates throughout the international intellectual property regime, including in ongoing battles within the World Trade Organization over the future direction of “TRIPS”, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. Yet despite its powerful symbolic message, the full extent of the Development Agenda's actual impact on the ground, both within WIPO and without, remains to be seen. This chapter places the WIPO Development Agenda in the context of evolving development policy generally, discusses the Agenda's principal provisions, and summarizes the multifarious contributions to the book.
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