Editor’s Note

With this issue, Law and Contemporary Problems initiates a new practice of offering occasional mini-symposia on topics which deserve treatment, but may not fill an entire issue. The topics we have chosen certainly deserve treatment. The questions of policy posed by the prospect of additional urban growth in the eighties demand far more thoughtful attention than they have yet had. The relevance of an examination into the control of political and ideological dissent is manifest as we contemplate world events of the past year. We are pleased to offer these two brief symposia. We will introduce others from time to time in future issues. David Lang

Reimagining the Public Domain

In a paper included among this collection of works from the Duke Law School’s Conference on the Public Domain, James Boyle kindly credits an early essay of mine, Recognizing the Public Domain, with having contributed initially to the contemporary study of the subject. Boyle quotes a passage from that essay in which I suggested that recognition of new intellectual property interests should be offset today by equally deliberate recognition of individual rights in the public domain . . . . Each [intellectual property] right ought to be marked off clearly against the public domain

At Play in the Fields of the Word: Copyright and the Construction of Authorship in the Post-Literate Millennium

The future of intellectual property rights is discussed. The emergence of new technologies will free authors from the constraints of publishers, and may lead to the transformation of copyright law

From Berne to Beijing: A Critical Perspective

Remarking on the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances at the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law’s Symposium, From Berne to Beijing, Professor Lange expressed general misgivings about exercising the Treaty Power in ways that alter the nature of US copyright law and impinge on other constitutional rights. This edited version of those Remarks explains Professor Lange’s preference for legislation grounded squarely in the traditional jurisprudence of the Copyright Clause, the First Amendment, and the public domain, and his preference for contracting around established expectations rather than reworking default rules through treaties. It continues by exploring the particular costs associated with the Beijing Treaty’s expansion of moral rights into US copyright law. Those expanded rights, viewed in light of previous legislative and judicial expansions of traditional US copyright principles, threaten to erode certain portions of the public domain and the exercise of First Amendment rights. Recognizing that additional rights for some result in a loss of rights for others, these Remarks invite critical reflection on the costs and benefits of the Beijing Treaty, “copyright restoration,” and other well-intentioned alterations to the status quo

Students, Music and the Net: A Comment on Peer-To-Peer File Sharing

As most of the public now know, the recording industry has lately filed civil suits alleging copyright infringement against hundreds of individual defendants across the country, many (I think most) of them college students and campus hangers-on. Hundreds more such suits are said to be in the offing. The nature of the infringements? Peer-to-peer file sharing via the Internet: a kind of piracy, to use the term favored by the industry, or downloading, as it is generally thought of by the students themselves - but from either perspective, the practice of recording music from the Net while making it available in turn to others, using any of a growing number of computer programs designed to make the practice work

From Berne to Beijing: A Critical Perspective

Remarking on the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances at the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law’s Symposium, From Berne to Beijing, Professor Lange expressed general misgivings about exercising the Treaty Power in ways that alter the nature of US copyright law and impinge on other constitutional rights. This edited version of those Remarks explains Professor Lange’s preference for legislation grounded squarely in the traditional jurisprudence of the Copyright Clause, the First Amendment, and the public domain, and his preference for contracting around established expectations rather than reworking default rules through treaties. It continues by exploring the particular costs associated with the Beijing Treaty’s expansion of moral rights into US copyright law. Those expanded rights, viewed in light of previous legislative and judicial expansions of traditional US copyright principles, threaten to erode certain portions of the public domain and the exercise of First Amendment rights. Recognizing that additional rights for some result in a loss of rights for others, these Remarks invite critical reflection on the costs and benefits of the Beijing Treaty, “copyright restoration,” and other well-intentioned alterations to the status quo