Too Much to Carry? Copyright Laws in the Electronic Environment

Digitization of information, the rise of the World Wide Web, and the development of new means for information creation, production and dissemination place new strains on the legal infrastructure of copyright laws in the United States. Review of the historical trends in copyright protection, focusing on changing socio-technical relations in the information production environment, uncovers five core problems: The difficulty of separating ideas from expression in determining infringement; diminution of the public domain; expansion of the definition of authorship; trivialization of the definition of artifact tangibility and fixation; and expansion of the timeframe for protection past the point where only original producers and their immediate heirs are rewarded. These problems, responses to earlier stakeholder concerns, tend to complicate efforts to develop an effective legal framework for copyright in an electronic environment.