>From: John Young <•••@••.•••>
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 1996
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: PIR_ate
3-31-96. NYT:
"Sold Out." By James Boyle, American University law
professor
We are in the middle of an information land grab and no
one seems to have noticed. Congress is now considering
the Administration's proposal for intellectual property
on the Internet, aimed at "saving" this thriving medium.
Using a far-fetched theory of what constitutes
"copying," the proposal would turn browsing an Internet
document into a copyright violation. It would
effectively privatize much of the public domain by
transforming the current law of fair use. It would make
on-line service providers strictly liable for their
customers' copyright violations, thus giving providers
an incentive to monitor what you do in cyberspace.
"Poetry can only be made out of other poems, novels out
of other novels," as the critic Northrop Frye famously
put it. The same goes for computer programs, which build
on the contributions of earlier hackers. Every
intellectual property claim is a chunk taken out of the
public domain. If we give someone a software patent over
basic functions, at some point the public domain will be
so diminished that future creators will be prevented
from creating because they won't be able to afford the
raw materials they need. An intellectual property system
has to insure that the fertile public domain is not
converted into a fallow landscape of walled private
plots.
