Today's copyright laws are muddled and outdated, law professor James Boyle explained Friday in a speech titled "We Don't Provide That Service: The Economic Irrationality of Copyright Rules on the Internet." The lecture kicked off a five-part series about "The Information Ecology," sponsored by the Center for the Study of Public Domain at Duke.
Boyle, a cyberlaw and intellectual property expert, is one of the founders of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that aims to increase access to shared information on the Internet.
"While [information is] potentially available on the World Wide Web, no one knows what they can use," Boyle said. "One solution is to go back to the old [copyright] rule. [That] is not possible, but a practical [option] is Creative Commons."
Confusion over how to use the Internet as a resource and how to give proper credit started long before the Recording Industry Association of America started suing people for downloading songs and movies illegally off the Internet, Boyle said.
"The RIAA has made it so that people believe everything on the Web belongs to someone," he said.
Copyright laws for non-Internet media such as compact discs were fairly straightforward, but when the Web arrived, things changed, Boyle said.
"Suddenly all those diaries, the picture of the Empire State Building, all of those things that sat in a dusty sock drawer, could now be put on the World Wide Web," he explained.
Boyle reminded the audience that under old rules, copyright status could only be achieved if the author wrote 'copyright' on the document. "You express your desire for copyright," he said. "Writing 'copyright' is not particularly onerous, most people can manage it."
Another aspect of the old laws is that if a copyright was not renewed, it would expire, whereas today a copyright exists by default, unless the author explicitly disclaims it.
"Default rules are the rules you get when you don't specify anything else.... Setting the default rule is very important," Boyle said.
The idea behind Creative Commons is to give authors an option beyond the default rule. Using the website, people can establish their own licenses, including details about when and where their products can be used and what type of credit must be attached, Boyle said.
The founders of Creative Commons recognized in 2001 that current copyright laws were lacking in areas relating to the Internet and acted to fill the void. "[Creative Commons] is not meant to compete with copyright, but to complement it," the website explains.
The Creative Commons website generates a license in three ways, Boyle said. The first version expresses itself in a way that a lawyer can understand it. The second expression is so that a layman can understand it and the third is so that a machine can understand it.
Currently between 750,000 and 1 million people use Creative Commons. Boyle said some Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty put their classes online, and now, anyone around the world can take an MIT class--just not receive an MIT degree.
To some audience members, the website's licensing capabilities are an important measure to address outdated copyright laws.
"I think the Creative Commons is generally a great idea.... I didn't know as much about [copyright laws] before the 80s," said Kristina Troost, adjunct assistant professor of history.
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