Julianna Yau’s blog

Historically, copyright law has existed to protect the remuneration to creators and producers/disseminators for copies of original works. How much each is protected through copyright law varies, depending on which version of the historical account you read.

Within all of those versions, the protection of user rights is close to zero.¹

And it wasn’t until personal recording technology in the form of things like audio cassettes, video cassettes, Betamax/VCRs, CD-Rs, mp3 and all sorts of other modern acronyms that users started to build a gradual concern for copyright.

So where does that leave us now?

With two basic types of users whose concerns need to be addressed by copyright legislation:

• professional users (i.e. creators)
• end-users (i.e. consumers)

Although many of their activities overlap, the primary difference boils down to our good friend Money.

The problem then becomes a horrible blurring of the line between what rights should be granted & protected and when & how those rights should be enforced. For us to move beyond the shouting matches and competitions of wit and rhetoric, I believe we need to start with looking at the two separately before bringing them together.

In Part 9: looking at the conceptual aspects of user rights.

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[1] Note that the historical treatment of performances of classical music is much different from current treatment of performances of almost anything. Income for composers used to be based on sales of sheet music, whereas now composers and playwrights generate income from both the sale of their compositions/plays and the performances. One could argue that users used to have more rights and/or that creators now have more rights, depending on where you’re standing.

Tags: betamax, copyright, user rights

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