IPR and the Digital Revolution

IPR and the Digital Revolution Summary Intellectual property law may establish the rights of authors and publishers, but it is not economically effective unless you are a substantial organization. This inherently disadvantages the entrepreneur and the small business who would look to copyright to protect their interests. Just as we have special regard to the rights of consumers we may need rights for smaller businesses, as we do in other areas of law such as in Unfair Contract Terms legislation. Special powers of controlling copyright works may be appropriate for small businesses that are inappropriate for larger ones who have effective access to law to protect their interests. Introduction Copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) have been established and extended over many hundreds of years. Although initially developed to give a publisher control over the right to publish (copy) a work, they were extended to give rights to authors, painters, photographers, film producers and software writers (amongst many others). Naturally, copyright protection was introduced as civil law because it was dealing with economic rights of one party against another. Criminal law was not appropriate, and, therefore, the state would not act on behalf of the copyright owner who had to take action themselves. At the time that these laws were formed it might be argued that the only people who could create rights were those who were educated, and therefore rich. Development As education became commonplace for everyone (in many countries there is a legal obligation to ensure that children go to school) so the ability to create copyright works became something that (almost) anyone in the world could do. At the same time there were debates about the wisdom of creating a system that would allow people absolute control over the copying and use of their works. Researchers and scientists could prevent anyone from checking or challenging their work. Political writers could ensure that what they wrote could only be seen by the faithful and never subject to proper criticism. This may not seem to have much to do with stopping people from copying music tracks or DVD productions, but they were seen as significant problems that the legislators wanted to address. At the bottom of their thinking was the idea that nobody should be able to create a monopoly on knowledge. Just imagine if it was illegal to write about what was in a newspaper or quote a passage from a book or a film because copyright law prevented you from doing that.
© LockLizard Ltd 2008 IPR and the Digital Revolution Page 1 of 4 Also, you could not have public libraries, schools and universities would not be able to provide books in support of some of their courses. Even teaching people about copyright works could itself be illegal. Counterbalance But the problem is that to use copyright laws, for the small trader, the individual author or musician, is that you need to be able to afford litigation. This is because you have to wait for someone to break your copyright, and then sue them for the damage caused to you. Let us take some practical examples. You are selling something on a computer auction site and you create a very good photograph of it and some nice text that really helps sell it and make it attractive to the purchaser. You have maybe a dozen of these to sell. The first sale goes brilliantly and you are already for the second when you notice that another seller has come in, is using your photograph and text, but selling the same item at half the price. What do you do? You can try and get the auction site to take-down the other person's advert, but they're hardly that interested. You could try suing them, but the costs of starting a court action are in the thousands, and the most you're likely to get back is hundreds because you have suffered little economic harm. But you're mad as hell that someone can do that to you and there's not a lot you can do about it. Or you are a trainer specializing in management development and you have invested a lot of effort into a really good presentation and notes to go with your course. You give a few courses, and then find out that someone else is advertising the course and the material they are showing looks very similar if not identical to yours. But what are you going to do? Can you go on their course and take copies of their mat... [download for more]