Posts Tagged: "Maria Pallante"

The Copyright Office has told Congress that the copyright laws are showing their age and need Congressional attention. With the prospect of comprehensive copyright reform on the horizon the familiar battle lines are being drawn between those who absolutely need copyright protection to survive and create versus those who are a part of the infringement culture. Without a solution to the growing culture of infringement original creation of copyrightable works will continue to experience downward pressure, which will ultimately curtail original creation by all those other than corporate conglomerates that have the resources to police and enforce. Do we really want to see the market squeeze out independent content creators due to copyright laws that don’t function given the new age technological realities?

The new reality is that content creators are getting squeezed all around. Increasingly many want things to be free and don’t care whether they copy a public domain work or whether it is something that is copyrighted. They don’t see it as wrong, but this makes it difficult to make a living for content creators. Truthfully, for some content creators it is darn near impossible. Yet everywhere you turn content creators are getting the short end of the stick. If it isn’t blatant and wanton copyright infringement online (which I have to deal with all the time), it is authors getting pennies on the dollar for eBooks or musicians who worked with Pandora to help the company get off the ground taken to Congress so the U.S. government can step in and take from creators for the benefit of the company they helped create. Even the name of the bill supported by Pandora — the Internet Radio Fairness Act — is insulting and misleading.