Copyright Law in a Digital Age

Paper Summary:

This paper examines in the way in which technological advances, particularly the development of the Internet, have revolutionized the field of intellectual property and copyright law in the United States. It provides a historical overview of the U.S. copyright laws and a synopsis and evaluation of the most recent legal trends in the light of some watershed technology cases, such as TotalNews and Napster. It also details the evolution of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and provides an analysis of its benefits and its shortcomings.

From the Paper:

"The recording companies answered Napster's claims point by point. They maintained that even though Napster did not copy unauthorized MP3s itself, it encouraged piracy through the listing of available connections designed to transfer copyrighted materials illegally and therefore should be found guilty of copyright infringement. Napster also had not adhered to procedural guidelines established for service providers and could not claim protection under the exceptions for service providers. The recording companies argued that any legitimate uses of Napster were irrelevant because "the chief and perhaps only reason that users signed up to Napster was the lure
of easy access to free pirate recordings" (Litman 160). The judge agreed with the record industry on all issues and ordered Napster to redesign its servers to block access to music files by major record labels or shut down completely. Napster's servers are still currently disabled as it seeks to filter out unauthorized copyrighted material (Litman 160-1)."

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