Copyright belongs to the ages

US-CopyrightOffice-Seal.svgMedia Wonk:

No wonder they call Economics the Dismal Science. At the Internet Video Policy Symposium in Washington yesterday (co-sponsored by Content Agenda), a chorus line of academic economists postulated that content owners face a far more difficult challenge than they know in monetizing their content on the Internet, and that the odds that we can build our way out of the current debate over how to manage scarce online capacity are virtually nil.The most enthusiastically glum was Gerry Faulhaber, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the former chief economist for the FCC. According to Faulhaber, copyright is a dead letter.

“Copyright is a very big issue in the legal world today, but in the business world, when you talk to consumers about protecting copyrights, it’s a dead issue,” he said. “It’s gone. If you have a business model based on copyright, forget it.”

Provocative, I suppose, though it sounds like an overstatement, and not necessarily all that logical. The copyright regime has never depended on the opinions of non-stakeholders, merely the ability to penalize them for infringement. The technological / legal dance is far from over. I would say that the Microsoft business model, to give one example of one that is “based on copyright” at least in part, is not exactly in “forget it” mode, and will not be all that fast.

But that’s not to say it looks good for copyright as a linchpin of monopoly-type business models in the future. No, no, no.

Originally posted 2014-12-03 12:54:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Ron Coleman

LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION blog author Ron Coleman is a member of Dhillon Law Group in their New York City and Montclair, New Jersey offices. He is a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law and Princeton University.

One Reply to “Copyright belongs to the ages”

  1. The deposit requirements for an application for copyright registration for a computer program that contains “trade secret information” are very reasonable, so I would assume that encourages companies to seek copyright protection for their computer programs.

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