Julianna Yau’s blog

I’m going to skip over discussing how financial remuneration fits into the copyright picture for now, because I’d like to keep working on some basic categorization.

So I guess that brings us to copyright law. I’m not even sure if I’m ready to break down this part of the copyright picture, but here goes…

Copyright law is a set of legislated rights extended to creators and producers/disseminators.

Some challenges we’re facing with the Copyright Act:

• the Copyright Act is convoluted
• we’re loosing sight of who and what the Act is supposed to be protecting and supporting
• due to changes/advancements in technology and how people create and interact with creative works, the stakeholders in copyright are shifting (users, for example, have a larger interest and are impacted more by copyright now than ever before)
• copyright reform has been long overdue and the stakeholders keep pushing harder for their changes with every passing day, for fear of being overlooked
• what’s in the Act itself is being challenged conceptually due to changing views on the relationship between copyright, creation and the flow of money

Overall, I would say at this point that the challenges we’re seeing with the Copyright Act are symptoms of a larger problem with copyright and other creators’ rights…and not the problem itself. Changing the Act at this point will likely cause more problems than its worth, because the real problems are not being addressed.

So what are the real problems? I’m hoping to clear the fog around that through this exercise.

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