Document Type

Speech

Publication Date

2006

Abstract

I'd like to thank the Copyright Society and the Brace committee for inviting me to speak to you this evening. I am honored that you invited me to give this lecture. I want to talk a little bit about war - copyright war - and then I want to talk a little bit about peace. It's become conventional that we're in the middle of a copyright war.' I tried to track down who started calling it that, and what I can tell you is that about ten years ago, about the time that copyright lawyers everywhere were arguing about the White House Information Infrastructure Task Force "White Paper" Report, we started seeing the phrase "copyright war" used as a figure of speech to express some of the passion and vitriol that characterized those arguments. It popped up more and more often until, by a couple of years ago, all the irony had leached out of the phrase and people were matter-of-factly referring to what's going on as the "copyright war" in news accounts, law review articles, and weblogs. So, by 2003, the usage had become standard. That year, by the way, was the year we saw the district court decision in Grokster, the Supreme Court decision in Eldred, and the first lawsuits filed against individual consumers for using peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

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