After reading a blog on the legal issues that are swirling around President Obama giving the Queen of England an iPhone (the article I read is here), I got to thinking about poor, slow copyright law and its efforts to catch infringers on the information superhighway.
Currently, it’s a just about hopeless race for copyright law. Every time the internet changes, copyright’s path gets longer, curvier, and further away from where copyright began.
Every now and then, it looks like copyright is gaining. The gap seemed to close a bit a few years ago when copyright violations took down some of the free music giants like Napster. And copyright is still visible in the online music race (here’s a recent article that mentions how copyrights are one of the keys that will unlock the music industry’s future on the web).
It also appears to be closing in on the online news front. Recently, Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal, accused Google and Amazon of stealing copyrighted news (here’s a Wired blog on the accusation). If the argument is valid, and search engines should be required to pay for the intellectual property they dig up, the changes that would need to be made could help pave the way for profitable online news.
Trouble is, copyright law is slow and the spread of information on the internet is fast. Every time copyright starts to make a move, the internet dashes off in another direction leaving copyright in the dust. Seems like if intellectual property and other copyrightable material has any hopes of showing the internet a good fight, the legal path needs to be repaved.
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