|  | By: Nicholas BENTLEY Mail: Nicholas(at)commonrights.com December 2005
| #  |

# The Right Track Notes on the Right Track as presented to the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3), December 2005. Today I want to present my 'Private Investigations' into copyright and its future in the digital world. Is Copyright on the Right Track? ### Summary: Copyright is part of our Intellectual Property regime that includes: Copyright Patents Trademarks Industrial secret I will be concentrating on copyright however some of what I propose could have an impact on other areas of IP especially patents and the relationship of software to copyright and patents. A topical subject for hackers I feel. [back to sildes] Movie - Copyright history by Rick Fulkerson: Despite Rick's US perspective and his slightly pessimistic view of copyright I believe that analogue copyright has worked well for 200 years - See all the books in the world that are distributing information and rewarding authors.[back to slides] DRM, inparticular Technical Protection Measures (TPM), are seen by some as the only way to protect copyrighted works in a digital environment. At the other extreme there are those who follow Jefferson's words to the letter and think all intellectual content is and should be free of any restrictions. I will argue that there is more to it than the above, that authors and artists still need to be rewarded for their work, that society activelly needs to protect the flow of ideas and information, and so we should look closer at how copyright can serve us in the future. [Back] ### Lawrence Lessig - Technology / copyright / laws: "The balance of IP regimes is a function of the technology of the time...... As the technology of copyright has changed so to have the laws." "The problem here is not the technology, not something called copyright, the problem here is a law, a regime, not fit to the technology." (Library of Congress - The Digital Future - C-span) [back to slides] I'm with Lessig here - we need to consider how we can change the regime to fit the technology. But before we consider this I would like to put forward another factor that influences our thinking in the area of copyright - ### Intellectual Contributions: ### When we think of books we think of physical property - the physical book. The name of the regime Intellectual Property (IP) reinforces this thinking. What happens if we started thinking of Intellectual Contributions (IC)? What happens if we start thinking of all the other works and ideas that came be the book as contributions to the book? Let's think IC. An author writing a new book relies on all the books and ideas that came before and these all contribute to her new work. In the field of science contributing works are usually cited. By the way, I am using books as the example here however I believe the same is true for all media - music, films, ect. And talking of citations, they can be considered as contributions to the porceeding works even if after the fact. Many scientists are judged by how often their work is cited. Looking at more of these reverse contributions: Taking the broadest view there are many contributions to a work - Recommendations, reviews, quotations and, perhaps most important, payments in money. Now to take a more formal view of these contributions:
| © 1999-2005 Nicholas BENTLEY (PRD; http:/www./commonrights.com/RightsOffice/ARO-122.htm#ARO2 ; http://www.commonrights.com/RightsOffice/CRO-100.htm#CRO2) |  | Collective Rights Identifier