Re: Deregulating Expressive Works

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:08:24 -0000

Steve R.: You can find discussions in chapters 5-7, among other places, of what it would look like if expressive works were regulated by common law, only. I suppose that most often, authors that wanted to maximize their control over their expressive works would use automated rights management and licensing. In theory, such protections could run forever. In practice, however, copies would get decoded and fall out of privity, falling into the public domain.

I used "what we communicate" advisedly. Copyright most certainly can and does restrict the content of our communications and, thus, what we communicate. You cannot communicate, say, a music video without sending a copy.

Re: Deregulating Expressive Works

Steve_R — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:20:14 -0000

Could you provide some concrete examples of what rights/obligations that the consumer/content producers would have under a common law scenario?

You wrote "To deregulate expressive works, we must let them escape from the Copyright Act
into common law." I am having a difficult time concerning the implications of what it would mean for copyright law to be a subset of common law.

My lay opinion a consumer, under common law, would be entitled to use copyrighted material virtually anyway they wish - provided they aren't selling it (or giving it away) without the copyrights owner's permission. Would this be a valid understanding?

Under a common law approach, how long would copyright last? I hope not perpetually.

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Nit picky editorial comment. I would suggest revising the sentence "Through it, copyright holders win the privilege of invoking state power to control how and what we communicate." to "Through it, copyright holders win the privilege of invoking state power to control how we use copyrighted material." I don't think that copyright law explicitly controls how we communicate, but it does severely restrict what we may do with copyrighted material.

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