Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Sunday, October 19, 2003

Why internet scholars hate copyright

Jonathan Zittrain, The Copyright Cuffs, CIO Magazine, October 15, 2003. Zittrain answers the question: Why do law professors specializing in internet law tend to hate copyright? Excerpt: "Without decrying the concept of taxation, every tax professor I've met regards the U.S. tax code with a kind of benign contempt, explaining it more often as a product of diverse interests shaped from the bottom up than as an elegant set of rules crafted by legal artisans to align with high-level principles about the most just way to redistribute resources or to maximize social welfare. Copyright is like that too, and while I hate its Platonic form no more than the typical tax maven hates tax, I find myself struggling to maintain the benign part of my contempt for its ever-expanding 21st-century American incarnation....The cost of making no change at all must also be soberly assessed, all the more so because the Internet heralds such a staggering potential for the rapid transformation and evolution of ideas. This is not about the crass ripping-off of CD tracks but about a possible Jazz Age of creation enabled by technology."