Julianna Yau’s blog

On October 16th, I attended Jessica Litman’s lecture on Copyright Liberties and the “Trumpet Problem”. The lecture was very exciting for me, because I recently finished reading her book Digital Copyright, which I loved. At the lecture, I was relieved that she knows her material well and is not only enthusiastic about it but also current. It has been a few years since I’ve attended a lecture, and many of my professors at the time were dull enough to drive me to the Independent Studies program at UWaterloo.

She touched briefly on having to distinguish the difference between distribution and making available, which I personally find to be two different but related concepts which the music and movie industries are all too eager to call one and the same.

Litman asked us, indirectly, to look more at the reason for copyright, rather than the forms and details of existing and past copyright laws. From her overview of the history of copyright law, it was obvious that the advancement of technology was moving much too quickly for the establishment of law, and I suspect that gap is increasing now that self-publishing of not merely artistic works but also technological works becomes easier.

For me, what was perhaps most interesting was a little tidbit she dropped: the RIAA doesn’t want an “ipod levy” because they don’t want to legalize personal copying. Hmm.