Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2007

Abstract

Let me begin with something that Jamie Boyle wrote ten years ago in Intellectual Property Policy Online: A Young Person's Guide:' Copyright marks the attempt to achieve for texts and other works a balance in which the assumption of the system is that widespread use is possible without copying. The relative bundles of rights of the user and the owner achieve their balance based on a set of economic and technical assumptions about the meaning of normal use. For our purposes, I would like to generalize this as something that Boyle might have written if he had not in that particular essay been talking about RAM (random access memory) copies: "Copyright marks the attempt to achieve for texts and other works a balance in which the assumption of the system is that widespread use is possible without [infringing]." The copyright model is based on a balance between uses copyright owners are entitled to control and other uses they simply are not entitled to control.


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