Copyright, Defined

Transcript

• 00:01

  Jen O'Neal's internet startup helps travelersaround the world connect online, but her companycould go belly up with the passage of SOPA and PIPA,proposed anti-piracy laws for the internet.We have tons of users in 200 countriesand there's seven of us, so if wehad to police all of their content,it would take all of our resources, all of our time,

• 00:24

  all of our money, and we wouldn't have timeto continue to build the product and innovate.Luckily for O'Neal, a vast public outcrypressured lawmakers to table the vote.Demonstrators protested what theycall censorship of the internet.The conflict reveals a tense power strugglebetween Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

• 00:44

  Copyright holders want to control how their content isshared, while technology companies wantto keep the internet restriction-free.Experts say copyright protection on the webpresents a tricky legal problem.In particular, the law has trouble keeping upwith technology, so once you passa law-- say you passed SOPA or PIPAor whatever-- the internet will likely route around it.

• 01:07

  They'll design new technology, somethingthat gets sort of around it, and then you're stuck with this lawthat you have to then update like all the time anyway.Copyright holders could rather pursue technological innovationto combat piracy much like Steve Jobs didwith hard-to-share iTunes files.Meanwhile, the media industry claimsit's losing billions of dollars each year

• 01:29

  to piracy though those figures can't be confirmed.But the success of the protests gives the tech industry hopethat it can take on the Hollywood behemoth.I think that the scale of last week's protestreplaced fear with a little bit of excitementthat there's something we can do about this.

• 01:51

  Once a freewheeling exchange place for ideas,the internet has matured into a tense battleground whereprofit and intellectual freedom are now on the line.

In comparison to the corresponding terms for “right of the author” in other languages, such as droit d'auteur (French), derechos de autor (Spanish), diritto d'autore (Italian), or Urheberrecht (German), the English term copyright explains quite precisely where it comes from and what it was about: regulating copying.

The first copyright legislation, the British Statute of Anne (1709–10), dealt explicitly with “Books and Other Writings.” Music was not yet thought to be protected under this legislation. But when in Western nations in the context of copyright law the attention turned toward music more than a century later, it also started with the idea of music as a literary work. At first, the main legal focus was on sheet music and the act of printing, not on music as a performance art. Because of the rise of digitalization and computerization in everyday life—with its massive extension of the possibilities to acquire, transform, and copy music—there is a shift of emphasis back toward the very same question of copying, now with regard to sound recordings.

Controlling printing and reprinting became a serious matter in music when composers like Ludwig van Beethoven started to emancipate themselves from being hired craftsmen for church, court, or public institutions to become free artists (although most kept daily jobs as conductors, teachers, etc.). But free also means being without regular income. The editions of the letters of Beethoven are full of lamentations by the composer about unauthorized reprints both at home and abroad. The situation got worse for Beethoven, a regular performer, when his increasing deafness stopped him from performing and generating income from it.

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