Abstract: I have chosen as my topic What Copyright Owes the Future. It may seem unusual to talk about copyright and future generations. But copyright indeed purports to restrain future behavior. Once an author creates a work, copyright law says that for at least 70 years-and often for 100 years or more-most use of that work will require the copyright owner's permission.
In essence, copyright law makes a promise to future generations. The law says that if an author today creates a work-a book, a song, a film, a play, a photograph, a painting- then sometime, a long way down the road, that work will pass out of copyright protection. And at that point in time, the inhabitants of the future will be able to copy the work freely, or adapt it, or sell it, or use it in any other way that copyright had restricted until then.
But that promise is at best illusory, and at worst fraudulent, if, by the time a work's copyright expires, the work itself no longer exists. Copyright's restraints on what can legally be done with a work may come to an end, but the copyright expiration will have no practical effect. On the day after the copyright expires, no citizen of the future will in fact be able to use the now-public-domain work in any of the ways that the law would then allow.
So at a minimum, copyright law and the copyright system owe the future an obligation to do whatever they can to help ensure that many works of authorship survive for future audiences to read, to listen to, to watch. And, we can hope, to learn from and enjoy.
I want to explore this subject in a bit more detail in four steps. First, I'll look at why preserving creative works is important and valuable. Next, I'll talk about the ways in which copyright law has traditionally encouraged or not encouraged the preservation of copyrighted works. Third, I'll look at how digital technology and computer networks, such as the Internet, pose new challenges for preserving creative works. And finally, I'll consider briefly how we might rethink and revise copyright law to respond to these digital challenges.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-12-20
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3
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