Bethany Klein - Understanding Copyright: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age

Bethany Klein, Giles Moss and Lee Edwards 2015

First published 2015

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014951148

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-4462-8583-1

ISBN 978-1-4462-8584-8 (pbk)

Editor: Mila Steele

Assistant editor: James Piper

Production editor: Imogen Roome

Copyeditor: Bryan Campbell

Indexer: Martin Hargreaves

Marketing manager: Michael Ainsley

Cover design: Jen Crisp

Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed in Great Britain by Henry Ling Limited at The Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD

Few aspects of our professional and personal lives have gone untouched by the digital shift. Digital technology is the current that runs through the way we communicate with one another and engage with the world around us. It has changed the manner in which news and entertainment media is produced, distributed and consumed, and it has collapsed the boundaries and roles related to such activities. As a consequence, laws that worked in an analogue world have struggled to keep pace with new digital developments. One area that has been especially stretched to breaking point by digital technologies and activities is intellectual property (IP), and copyright in particular.

How do we know when a law is no longer working as it intended? We might notice that many people do not realize if and when they are breaking the law and we may find that behaviour considered normal or ordinary crosses the line into illegality. We might also recognize that regulatory or enforcement responses to illegal activities seem to many people heavy-handed or inappropriate. Surveys suggest that the line between legal and illegal activity around copyright is, for many, a blurred one (Ofcom, 2012; A. Hill, 2013), and the increasing number of sites and technologies through which we access media has only added to the confusion, with streaming, downloading and sharing legitimated through above-board platforms and subscription-based or advertising-supported services. Furthermore, the distinction between sharing analogue and digital versions of media, while significant to media companies and creators, isnt always recognized by users, who may view digital sharing as a simple extension of an activity which has long taken place between friends and family members (Cenite et al., 2009; Caraway, 2012; Edwards et al., 2013b). Finally, the overzealous approach to enforcement by some corporations in the cultural industries, especially in the early days of peer-to-peer (P2P), resulted in lawsuits that were sometimes filed against sympathetic defendants, from young children and digitally illiterate grandparents to victims of mistaken identity (see Brainz, n.d.). As these examples suggest, the digital context has widened and revealed a gulf between copyright law and everyday practices.