On The Margins

Sunday October 17, 2004

[ Networks ] "Copy" and Ditigal Rights

It's refreshing to see engineering and law academics plunging into fields at the cross section of engineering, economics and law. In a wonderfully written academic paper from a couple of years ago, Ernest Miller and Joan Feigenbaum do exactly that: "Taking the Copy Out of Copyright", in Proceedings of the 2001 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Digital Rights Management. vol. 2320, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, 2002, pages 233-244.

Feigenbaum and Miller first look at the evolution of the concept of "copy" which originally refered to the "copy" written or produced by the composer, not the one made through laborious act of "copying". This view of copy is similar to the view we think of when we think of "copy editors," a group of people sitting at news wire headquarters and editing "copy" written by the actual authors and journalists in the field. Miller and Feigenbaum write:

Unfortunately for the conventional history, in the Copyright Act of 1790, reproduction was not one of the rights granted to the author. This first federal copyright statute did not mention copying at all. Instead, the statute spoke of "publishing, printing, and vending." All three of these terms mean something other than the simple reproduction of a work – they imply distribution . . .

Historically, the fundamental object of copyright law was not a copy or copies of a work but rather publication of the work. The meaning of "copy," as used in the word copyright, was a reference to the manuscript. The "copyright" was certain exclusive rights with regard to the manuscript, in particular the right to publish--not an exclusive right of reproduction. The etymology of the term "copy" (from the Oxford English Dictionary) as used within the copyright is clear:

IV. That which is copied
8. a. The original writing, work of art, etc. from which a copy is made . . .

As a matter of fact, the term "copying" did not enter the copyright statutes until the Copyright Act of 1909.

Once the term "copying" entered the statute, it is easy to see how it could eventually come to be interpreted as granting a right to reproduction.

In their paper, Feigenbaum and Miller argue that "the right to control copying should be eliminated as an organizing principle of copyright law. In its place, we propose as an organizing principle the right to control public distribution of the copyrighted work."

I've been working along the same lines on some ideas for Digital Rights Management (DRM) and it was pleasant to discover, quite accidentally, about the convergence of views regarding the distinction between copying (often for the purposes of sharing and mixing) and wide distribution or publishing of the "copy."

2004-10-17 16:28:08.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.