Hverdagens synder

I en glimrende, humoristisk artikel viser John Tehranian hvordan vi alle - i hvert fald så snart vi sætter os ned ved en computer, går igang med at arbejde, eller i det hele taget deltager i det 21 århundrede og det mærkelig fænomen vi kalder nettet - bliver potentielt skyldige i lovbrud i millonklassen. Og det uden at bruge peer-to-peer netværk og andet uværk, som for mange unge er den primære kontaktflade med "kulturen". Nu er det slut med valgkamp, og på tide politikerne ser på hvordan ophavsretsloven kan komme til at stemme overnes med vores normer og dagligdagsliv. Her på DR er jeg TRÆT af hele tiden at blive bremset af pseudo-hensyn til ophavsretten - vi begår alle, dagligt, mere eller mindre bevidst større eller mindre brud, som ikke skader nogen, og som er nødvendige for at kunne foretage sig nogetsomhelst kreativt.

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, he would be indisputably 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.

Download "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap" (PDF) (Spring evt introen over og gå direkte til afsnittet "Infringement Nation") der starter således:

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.