From The San Francisco Chronicle
Copyright law needs a digital-age upgrade
By Pamela Samuelson
Did you ever imagine you could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends?
If you did not get the copyright owner's permission for these actions, you could be violating the law. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works....
Copyright law today touches the lives of ordinary people in ways that were unimaginable in the 1960s because advances in computing and communications technologies have transformed how we use and access content, most of which is copyrighted automatically by law. Millions of ordinary people also are becoming authors of user-generated content, such as videos, digital photographs and blogs, which they share on Web 2.0 platforms. This makes them copyright stakeholders, although the law was not drafted with them in mind, and it does not meet their needs....
With so many new participants and technologies in the copyright system, it is time for copyright law to receive an upgrade. It must become more flexible to accommodate new uses and technologies. It must also become simpler, so that everyone who creates and consumes copyrighted works can understand and use the law effectively without having to call a lawyer every time they want to download a file from the Internet....
Pamela Samuelson is a distinguished professor of law and director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at UC Berkeley School of Law [and professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information]. She convened a group of legal experts over the past three years to draft reforms to U.S. copyright law.