Издательство ABC-CLIO, 2007, -337 pp.
The human desire to claim property rights in an idea is innate, as any child who has ever told another Stop copying me! knows. Legal recognition of property in ideas, however— intellectual property—is a comparatively recent phenomenon, appearing centuries of millennia after the recognition of property rights in objects and land.
Revolutions in technology bring about revolutions in law. The human race has experienced four great revolutions in information technology. The first, lost in prehistory and probably predating our emergence as a species, was language. The ability to attach specific sound-symbols to specific thoughts is what makes human civilization—including legal systems—possible. The second revolution, the invention of writing, made more complex legal systems possible. When written documents could only be copied by hand, however, the incentive for making unauthorized copies of entire works was limited—although disputes did arise, including the possibly mythical dispute between St. Columba and St. Finnian (discussed in Chapter 2) that may have led to three thousand deaths.
The third revolution in information technology was the invention of movable-type printing. The ability to reproduce printed works quickly and easily created an incentive for printers to copy the works of others, and a corresponding incentive for the authors of those works to prevent unauthorized copying. Some countries (Korea and England, for example) reacted by granting monopolies to approved printers and forbidding all others from operating printing presses. In addition to controlling unauthorized copying, this had the fringe benefit of preventing the printing of any material criticizing the govement. In many countries several centuries passed before these monopolies were replaced by freedom of the press and mode copyright regimes. The three best-known forms of intellectual property—copyright, patent, and trademark—appeared in Europe during the Renaissance.
After the printing revolution had taken place in east Asia, but before it reached Europe, Europe’s commercial revolution led to laws requiring the use of symbols and words to identify the products of particular bakeries, breweries, and eventually other businesses. And the increase in the rate of technological change in the fifteenth century (the century that saw, among other innovations, the arrival of the printing press in Europe) led the Italian city-states to issue patents to inventors, granting them exclusive rights to their inventions for limited periods of time.
The fourth revolution in information technology is happening right now. The advent of personal computing and the Inteet has solved the problem expressed by Abbott Joseph Liebling, who in 1960 complained that Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. Today billions of people own presses; the barrier to universal distribution of any content they may choose to create is not expense, but the difficulty of getting people interested—a problem commercial presses have always faced. This revolution in information technology poses a dual problem for traditional media. First, much Web content borrows and incorporates existing material, and the extent to which such borrowing should be permitted has not yet been fully resolved.
Second, many users create no content of their own, but merely make and pass along unauthorized copies of existing content. Existing law clearly frowns on this copying, but enforcement is difficult. The fourth information technology revolution has also accelerated the inteationalization of intellectual property law. The inteational nature of trade in intellectual property has been apparent since at least the mid-nineteenth century; in the digital age, however, barriers to inteational exchange of information have vanished entirely.
Intellectual property law has adapted more quickly to the fourth information revolution than to the first three. The response time to the first revolution might have been measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years; the response to the second revolution, in millennia; and the response to the third, in centuries, or at least decades. The legal system responded to the appearance of the Inteet, and especially the World Wide Web, much more quickly. Within five years of the appearance of the first easily usable Web browser, the United States had enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other statutes, which were designed to extend and strengthen copyright protection, and the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which was designed to protect the interests of trademark holders in what was then called cyberspace.
This book serves as a reference guide to humanity’s attempts, up to and throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, to balance the interests of consumers and producers and create a workable national and inteational intellectual property law system. Intellectual property law is currently in crisis; this book is designed to serve as a starting point for future research, and the resources provided here will make it possible to locate up-to-the-minute information in a wide variety of areas.
Background and History
Problems, Controversies, and Solutions
Worldwide Perspective
Chronology
Biographies
Data and Documents
Directory of Organizations
Resources
The human desire to claim property rights in an idea is innate, as any child who has ever told another Stop copying me! knows. Legal recognition of property in ideas, however— intellectual property—is a comparatively recent phenomenon, appearing centuries of millennia after the recognition of property rights in objects and land.
Revolutions in technology bring about revolutions in law. The human race has experienced four great revolutions in information technology. The first, lost in prehistory and probably predating our emergence as a species, was language. The ability to attach specific sound-symbols to specific thoughts is what makes human civilization—including legal systems—possible. The second revolution, the invention of writing, made more complex legal systems possible. When written documents could only be copied by hand, however, the incentive for making unauthorized copies of entire works was limited—although disputes did arise, including the possibly mythical dispute between St. Columba and St. Finnian (discussed in Chapter 2) that may have led to three thousand deaths.
The third revolution in information technology was the invention of movable-type printing. The ability to reproduce printed works quickly and easily created an incentive for printers to copy the works of others, and a corresponding incentive for the authors of those works to prevent unauthorized copying. Some countries (Korea and England, for example) reacted by granting monopolies to approved printers and forbidding all others from operating printing presses. In addition to controlling unauthorized copying, this had the fringe benefit of preventing the printing of any material criticizing the govement. In many countries several centuries passed before these monopolies were replaced by freedom of the press and mode copyright regimes. The three best-known forms of intellectual property—copyright, patent, and trademark—appeared in Europe during the Renaissance.
After the printing revolution had taken place in east Asia, but before it reached Europe, Europe’s commercial revolution led to laws requiring the use of symbols and words to identify the products of particular bakeries, breweries, and eventually other businesses. And the increase in the rate of technological change in the fifteenth century (the century that saw, among other innovations, the arrival of the printing press in Europe) led the Italian city-states to issue patents to inventors, granting them exclusive rights to their inventions for limited periods of time.
The fourth revolution in information technology is happening right now. The advent of personal computing and the Inteet has solved the problem expressed by Abbott Joseph Liebling, who in 1960 complained that Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. Today billions of people own presses; the barrier to universal distribution of any content they may choose to create is not expense, but the difficulty of getting people interested—a problem commercial presses have always faced. This revolution in information technology poses a dual problem for traditional media. First, much Web content borrows and incorporates existing material, and the extent to which such borrowing should be permitted has not yet been fully resolved.
Second, many users create no content of their own, but merely make and pass along unauthorized copies of existing content. Existing law clearly frowns on this copying, but enforcement is difficult. The fourth information technology revolution has also accelerated the inteationalization of intellectual property law. The inteational nature of trade in intellectual property has been apparent since at least the mid-nineteenth century; in the digital age, however, barriers to inteational exchange of information have vanished entirely.
Intellectual property law has adapted more quickly to the fourth information revolution than to the first three. The response time to the first revolution might have been measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of years; the response to the second revolution, in millennia; and the response to the third, in centuries, or at least decades. The legal system responded to the appearance of the Inteet, and especially the World Wide Web, much more quickly. Within five years of the appearance of the first easily usable Web browser, the United States had enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other statutes, which were designed to extend and strengthen copyright protection, and the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, which was designed to protect the interests of trademark holders in what was then called cyberspace.
This book serves as a reference guide to humanity’s attempts, up to and throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, to balance the interests of consumers and producers and create a workable national and inteational intellectual property law system. Intellectual property law is currently in crisis; this book is designed to serve as a starting point for future research, and the resources provided here will make it possible to locate up-to-the-minute information in a wide variety of areas.
Background and History
Problems, Controversies, and Solutions
Worldwide Perspective
Chronology
Biographies
Data and Documents
Directory of Organizations
Resources