COPYCENSE

We have been extraordinarily busy lately, and therefore have yet to write on important issues like the Amazon Kindle situation. Yet, we felt compelled to write this entry after two occurrences over the past four days.

In the first situation, several of the participants thanked us for leading a recent copyright training session. While doing so, many participants commented they felt our education session was useful because it was the first session they ever had attended in which the session leader actually required them to read relevant portions of the Copyright Act of 1976. It is hard to fathom how one could teach copyright without reviewing the statute. In fact, we never write a post here on Copycense without having a browser tab open to the U.S. Copyright Office’s official version of the law.

In the second situation, we were reviewing our sources, first comments to a copyright-related Techdirt post; then a post from Ben Sheffner, the editor of the Copyrights & Campaigns blog. Sheffner, who has done a fine and professional job covering the Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum copyright infringement trials, opened his post by writing the following:

On the Internet, (almost) everyone hates copyright. In fact that’s one of the reasons I started this blog. Every day, for years, I would read about how copyright is stupid, outmoded, destructive, and downright evil. But I knew that the ‘law’ I would read about bore scant resemblance to the actual law, and the way that businesses that earn revenue from production and exploitation of copyrighted works actually function. And I knew that not everyone harbored such vitriol and venom for the copyright owners, who routinely win major victories in the courts and the political arena.

After these two incidents, we thought that one reason so much misinformation (and even disinformation) exists about copyright is because too few ever have actually read the statute.

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