[LINK] Republican Study Committee Intellectual Property Brief

[Rick Welykochy]

David Boxall wrote:

> <http://www.scribd.com/doc/113633834/Republican-Study-Committee-Intellectual-Property-Brief>
> The last line says it all:
> "Current copyright law does not merely distort some markets - rather it
> destroys entire markets."

Thanks David. And from the Republicans no less.

The article leads the reader to an entertaining "Gedankenexperiment" in
an accompanying document from UT/USA in the Utah Law Review at

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1029151

Here are the lead and final paragraphs thereof, starting on p.543:


"A. Infringement Nation

To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for
the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical
law professor named John. For the purposes of this Gedankenexperiment,
we assume the worst- case scenario of full enforcement of rights by copyright
holders and an uncharitable, though perfectly plausible, reading of existing
case law and the fair use doctrine. Fair use is, after all, notoriously fickle
and the defense offers little ex ante refuge to users of copyrighted works.

In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up
the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to
automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he
drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their
email— represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance
of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent
by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.

[[... on down to ...]]

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails,
three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs,
an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes
and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of
infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say
nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly
extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined
to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute
salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable
for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly,
he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file-sharing.
Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must
either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand
larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to
say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright
law and norms has grown only wider in recent years."


CAVEAT to Linkers with tattoos on display: Hana-Barbera (for example) could
literally demand your skin (p.545)


cheers
rickw


-- 
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Rick Welykochy || Vitendo Consulting


No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says.
He is always convinced that it say what he means.
      -- George Bernard Shaw