Six months ago I barely knew a copyright from a patent; and not that I am an expert by any means now, but I at least have a basic conception of the issues, the players, the process, and what is at stake. The system as it stands right now is tilted way in the favor of huge corporate copyright holders, for whose benefit Congress keeps extending the copyright period longer and longer.

Here is a very fine report by the Free Expression Policy Project summarizing where we are now and how we got there:

Executive Summary

Should teenagers be allowed to swap music over the Internet? Should computer hackers be allowed to decrypt the entertainment industry's electronic locks on e-books, songs, or movies? Should authors, artists, and their heirs have complete and perpetual control over the sale, copying, and distribution of their creations?

Copyright law has become a rocky, treacherous field of free-expression battles. It is at the core of today's controversies in the arts, culture, and scholarship. New laws passed by Congress to aid the companies that make up the "copyright industry" have intensified the debates. These laws have badly upset the "difficult balance" between rewarding creativity through the copyright system and society's competing interest in the free flow of ideas.

In 1998, for example, Congress passed the "Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act," which delayed the time when creative works will enter the "public domain" to nearly a century for corporations and even longer for many individuals and their heirs. The same year, the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA) made it a crime to distribute technology that circumvents electronic locks on books, films, articles, software, or songs — even though circumvention itself is not always illegal, and even though a ban on technology strikes directly at scientific research.

Lawsuits contesting these new restrictions have had mixed results. A constitutional challenge to the Sonny Bono law now awaits decision by the Supreme Court. The government is prosecuting a Russian company under the DMCA for creating a device to decrypt electronic books. Entertainment companies, having shut down the Napster system for swapping music online, are now trying to wipe out other file-sharing programs like Grokster and KaZaA. Meanwhile, scholars, librarians, artists, computer scientists, and many others are working toward a more open, free-speech-friendly copyright system.

The tension between strong copyright control and free expression today cannot be ignored. We hope this report will provide a useful resource in the ongoing debate and help restore the "difficult balance" between copyright control and free expression.

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