pikine's Journal: Copyright reform: electronic copying (draft)

This article is part of a series that describe some ideas for reforming current copyright law. The approach I'm taking is ad-hoc. A specific problem is listed, and a solution is proposed, followed by the rationale.

The act of copying in the digital age becomes ill-defined. When copyrighted work exists in electronic form, any transfer of such work entails: (1) the transmitter creates a transient copy in the electronic medium for transmission, (2) the receiver creates a record of the transmission once the copy is received. A transfer of electronic copy would mean that at least 2 permanent copies and 1 temporary copy can exist during the transfer. The chain of transfer ends when the digital copyrighted work is converted back to analog form for perception. Current DRM scheme seeks to control the whole chain of transfer to ensure that no unauthorized copies are retained.

The proposed reform is to consider the whole chain of electronic transfer as "performance" of the copyright work rather than duplication. We differentiate "performing private use work in public" and "performing copyrighted work without a use license" as two separate types of infringement.

When the chain involves the Internet, the chain could be indefinitely long, so it is impossible to estimate the number of unauthorized performances of the whole chain. We only count "making available" to each entity as one performance. In addition, we penalize the entity who obtains copyrighted "private use" work over the Internet without a private use license.

This proposal is to be refined...