3. Free Use Vs. Fair Use

As I observed at the beginning of this book, property law originally granted property owners the right to control their property from the ground to the heavens. The airplane came along. The scope of property rights quickly changed. There was no fuss, no constitutional challenge. It made no sense anymore to grant that much control, given the emergence of that new technology.

Our Constitution gives Congress the power to give authors “exclusive right” to “their writings.” Congress has given authors an exclusive right to “their writings” plus any derivative writings (made by others) that are sufficiently close to the author’s original work. Thus, if I write a book, and you base a movie on that book, I have the power to deny you the right to release that movie, even though that movie is not “my writing.” Congress granted the beginnings of this right in 1870, when it expanded the exclusive right of copyright to include a right to control translations and dramatizations of a work.

The courts have expanded it slowly through judicial interpretation ever since. This expansion has been commented upon by one of the law’s greatest judges, Judge Benjamin Kaplan.

So inured have we become to the extension of the monopoly to a large range of so-called derivative works, that we no longer sense the oddity of accepting such an enlargement of copyright while yet intoning the abracadabra of idea and expression.

I think it’s time to recognize that there are airplanes in this field and the expansiveness of these rights of derivative use no longer make sense. More precisely, they don’t make sense for the period of time that a copyright runs. And they don’t make sense as an amorphous grant. Consider each limitation in turn.

Term: If Congress wants to grant a derivative right, then that right should be for a much shorter term. It makes sense to protect John Grisham’s right to sell the movie rights to his latest novel (or at least I’m willing to assume it does); but it does not make sense for that right to run for the same term as the underlying copyright. The derivative right could be important in inducing creativity; it is not important long after the creative work is done.

Scope: Likewise should the scope of derivative rights be narrowed. Again, there are some cases in which derivative rights are important. Those should be specified. But the law should draw clear lines around regulated and unregulated uses of copyrighted material. When all “reuse” of creative material was within the control of businesses, perhaps it made sense to require lawyers to negotiate the lines. It no longer makes sense for lawyers to negotiate the lines. Think about all the creative possibilities that digital technologies enable; now imagine pouring molasses into the machines. That’s what this general requirement of permission does to the creative process. Smothers it.

This was the point that Alben made when describing the making of the Clint Eastwood CD. While it makes sense to require negotiation for foreseeable derivative rights—turning a book into a movie, or a poem into a musical score—it doesn’t make sense to require negotiation for the unforeseeable. Here, a statutory right would make much more sense. In each of these cases, the law should mark the uses that are protected, and the presumption should be that other uses are not protected. This is the reverse of the recommendation of my colleague Paul Goldstein. His view is that the law should be written so that expanded protections follow expanded uses. Goldstein’s analysis would make perfect sense if the cost of the legal system were small. But as we are currently seeing in the context of the Internet, the uncertainty about the scope of protection, and the incentives to protect existing architectures of revenue, combined with a strong copyright, weaken the process of innovation. The law could remedy this problem either by removing protection beyond the part explicitly drawn or by granting reuse rights upon certain statutory conditions. Either way, the effect would be to free a great deal of culture to others to cultivate. And under a statutory rights regime, that reuse would earn artists more income.

If you read a book, that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you give someone the book, that act is not regulated by copyright law. If you resell a book, that act is not regulated (copyright law expressly states that after the first sale of a book, the copyright owner can impose no further conditions on the disposition of the book). If you sleep on the book or use it to hold up a lamp or let your puppy chew it up, those acts are not regulated by copyright law, because those acts do not make a copy.

Obviously, however, some uses of a copyrighted book are regulated by copyright law. Republishing the book, for example, makes a copy. It is therefore regulated by copyright law. Indeed, this particular use stands at the core of this circle of possible uses of a copyrighted work. It is the paradigmatic use properly regulated by copyright regulation.

Finally, there is a tiny sliver of otherwise regulated copying uses that remain unregulated because the law considers these “fair uses.” These are uses that themselves involve copying, but which the law treats as unregulated because public policy demands that they remain unregulated. You are free to quote from this book, even in a review that is quite negative, without my permission, even though that quoting makes a copy. That copy would ordinarily give the copyright owner the exclusive right to say whether the copy is allowed or not, but the law denies the owner any exclusive right over such “fair uses” for public policy (and possibly First Amendment) reasons.

In real space, then, the possible uses of a book are divided into three sorts: (1) unregulated uses, (2) regulated uses, and (3) regulated uses that are nonetheless deemed “fair” regardless of the copyright owner’s views. Enter the Internet—a distributed, digital network where every use of a copyrighted work produces a copy. And because of this single, arbitrary feature of the design of a digital network, the scope of category 1 changes dramatically. Uses that before were presumptively unregulated are now presumptively regulated. No longer is there a set of presumptively unregulated uses that define a freedom associated with a copyrighted work. Instead, each use is now subject to the copyright, because each use also makes a copy—category 1 gets sucked into category 2. And those who would defend the unregulated uses of copyrighted work must look exclusively to category 3, fair uses, to bear the burden of this shift.

In the judgement of the Supreme Court in Acuff-Rose Music they decisively stated that, "when a commercial use amounts to mere duplication of the entirety of the original, it clearly supersedes the object of the original and serves as a market replacement for it, making it likely that cognizable market harm to the original will occur."

Sorry if this is a little off-topic but i just thought it fitted in.

How about adding a Royalty Free/Samples/Remix section so Panda members can provide Royalty Free Samples for other Panda members to use to create remix's and whatnot of their work ?! Just an idea.