Electronic Commerce and Free Speech

The end of ownership?: An investigation of users' preferences and perceptions of ownership configurations

“…When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was enacted in 1998, observers in the United States considered it to be an initial success for the entertainment industry, and one step forward to the idea of an expanded “American shopping mall,” because the Act made it illegal to circumvent the digital rights management (DRM) measures on digital information products (Litman, , p. 213). But digital content did not proliferate immediately after its enactment, as content providers had promised (Gasaway, ).…”

Theft in the information age: Music, technology, crime, and claims-making

“…It is now being redesigned in order to allow for the commercialization of this information (Litman, 2002). The vast majority of files available on the Internet are free--they are the web pages browsed by millions, with their components, which exist precisely to be downloaded and watched, read, listened to at leisure.…”

Copyright Notices in Traditional and New Media Journals: Lies, Damned Lies, and Copyright Notices

“…Fair use is also closely tied to free speech (Burk, 2001), and the two are interrelated to scholarship (Herrington, 1998), as scholars must be free to make unpopular statements. Furthermore, the ties between free speech and democracy are well‐established (Litman, 1999; Pfaffenberger, 2001). There is also a large body of work on how the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, along with digital rights management software (DRM, also referred to by some as digital restrictions management), can completely deny people their fair use rights in the digital domain (Benkler, 1999; Doctorow, 2004; Lessig, 2004; Vaidhyanathan, 2002).…”