Copyright And Publishing Essay Research Paper Copyrights

Copyright And Publishing Essay, Research Paper

Copyrights are designed to provide some form of protection against unauthorized use of original informational materials. The rapid shift of information production and distribution to electronic form, with its corresponding ease of copying, naturally makes copyright-dependent industries nervous. Much talk in the news and on the net these days is about the future of copyright law, a law developed in an age of print and now perhaps too tied to that medium to have ready application to today.s information technology.The fate of copyright may seem in doubt to some, but copyright has a long durable history. It has survived countless technological changes over nearly two centuries, including the advent of photography, the phonograph, player pianos, motion pictures, audiotapes and cassettes, and computer programs-and it.s still going strong. From this historical perspective, then, one might paraphrase Mark Twain by concluding that reports of copyright.s death are greatly exaggerated.Neither to expect that copyright will survive the new information technologies is not to expect that it will be unchanged, nor that those industries publishing, music, computer software, etc. that depend on copyright law will remain unchanged. To the contrary, pressure for change will build on both industry practice and copyright doctrine to sharply intersect in several areas. One significant area is that of copyright preemption of state contract law. For a combination of reasons, we can expect to se considerable emphasis in litigation on the preemption doctrine in the future.Copyright owners have a variety of rights under the copyright act, including the rights of reproduction, and the rights of public distribution, performance, and display. For convenience, let the term “copying. serve as a surrogate for all of these various rights.Copyright owners need a certain amount of protection against copying in order to make a profit at a given level and scale of business. “Protection. means an assurance that no more than some amount of copying of their works will take place once those works are released to others. Protection does not have to be, absolute. That is, once a work of authorship is released to the public, as a practical matter some uncontrolled copying is possible and even likely. But without some practical, predictable limits on copying, copyright owners will not be willing to release commercial materials to the public in any substantial volume.Those who are steeped in copyright law will naturally and almost automatically think of those predictable limits as stemming from copyright law. Protection against copying does not depend solely on copyright.s legal restrictions however. Those restrictions are but one of four forms of protection. For example, the publishers of Rolling Stone magazine, with it.s glossy photographs and typeset text, do not need to worry much about their market being eaten away by photocopy machines-photocopies of Rolling Stone are just too inferior to the original to be competitive with it. This would remain true even if the cost of photocopy machines dropped low enough that every home had one. It would remain true even in the absence of a copyright law because for colorful, glossy magazines, the inferior quality of photocopies alone will ensure that copying would be at a minimum. To be sure, photocopying is only one technology for reproduction. Much higher quality reproduction is possible, using the same techniques used by magazines themselves-typesetting, etc. But use of these high quality-printing techniques raises the cost of copying so high that it is cheaper to buy an original.Even when magazines move today to the on-line world, they have little to fear of serious erosion in their paper subscription sales. For example, such magazines as Time, Spin, and Home and Garden can be browsed online. The slowness of browsing, the slowness of downloading the graphic images and the fact that many illustrations are not available, however, means that currently there is little competition between the computerized and the print versions of such periodicals.On the other hand, if the state of the photocopy art were to advance so that every home had a machine that could make a perfect copy of a magazine, then the publishers of any number of magazines and similar works would have a lot to worry about. In particular, they would have to look beyond the state of the copying art to achieve the limits on copying that are necessary to earn a profit.One such limitation is the use of special technical devices to limit reproduction. Though not common in the market for glossy magazines (they are not needed there), such devices do appear in industries where the state of the copying art does little to stop copying. In computer software and satellite transmissions, for example, one sees a variety of special technologies implemented to control copying. Today satellite signals are “scrambled. and require a “describer. at the receiving end to make use of them. This is a typical example of a technical device designed to defeat easy copying. Another example of special technical restrictions is that of a publisher selling a drum to a library but providing the Drum in a personal computer that has no accessible floppy disk and form, which the Cd-rom itself cannot be removed. The scrambled signal and the specially configured computer are kinds of technical anti-copying devices