The Incompatibility of Copyright and Author :: Internet Laws Essays

The Incompatibility of Copyright and Author Like the book, a song's qualities change as it is presented on the Internet -- instead of being a tangible object, in cyberspace the song is much like McLuhan's electric light. Part of what helped recorded music parallel the book was the shared tangibility of their formats; compact discs, like bound books, can be held in hand. Without a tangible object to attach the concept of copyright, music becomes pure content, and shapeless, difficult to control. Songs passed between computer users have authors in the sense of a creator, but not in the sense of an authoring property owner. "With the slow advent of changes in consciousness brought on by the new electronic media technology, we may be beginning to see the deconstruction of solid individuality and ownership" (304, Sloop & Herman). The networked environment transforms a shared file into something akin to a conversation between two persons. This conceptualization of the music file conflicts with the notion of ownership in that conversations are not owned by either speaker; they are shared. The file sharing application Napster, created by Shawn Fanning, works thus. While the computer is disconnected from the network, songs are owned by the owner of the computer in which they reside. But when a network patch is achieved, "The resulting program, christened 'Napster,' worked by turning every user's computer into a small file server, linking all participants in a giant 'you show me yours, I'll show you mine,' dishing up digitized music" (Alderman, 103). Of course, the program made it possible to acquire music without paying for it, but it did so by breaking down the idea of song as an author's property. Part of that breakdown is caused by the change in medium that MP3 technology made possible. Did Napster dismantle ownership by theft, or was it the nature of the Internet that led to this breakdown? A recent book published by the National Research Council explains the difference between in copies made in cyberspace and those made on a Xerox machine: . . . so many noninfringing copies are routinely made in using a computer that the act has lost much of its predictive power: Noting that a copy has been made (in cyberspace) tells far less about the legitimacy of the behavior than it does in the hard-copy world.