Copyright Insight Out: A Legal Sociologist’s Perspective

Abstract

In my work as a researcher and teacher of legal sociology, copyright issues have always played an important role. I have been particularly interested in studying how copyright has changed under the influence of technology. The start of my career as a law professor in 1998 coincided with the invention of file sharing. In the years that followed, I used file sharing in my teaching to illustrate how digital technology challenged the effectiveness of government sanctions as a means of copyright enforcement. In my research, exploring the relationship between materiality and sociality, or how technological infrastructure and law interact, has become central. It focuses on the concept of normative expectations and the related question of how the law can regulate norm-building processes in a social context. Overall, the law and society perspective has proved useful in analysing the social impact of a new technology and in incorporating the insights gained into legal practice in order to make concrete suggestions for improvement