Copyright (c) 2008 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/jonah_knobler Recent documents in Jonah M. Knobler en-us Thu, 03 Jan 2008 05:30:18 PST 3600 http://works.bepress.com/jonah_knobler/1 http://works.bepress.com/jonah_knobler/1 Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:32:18 PDT This article attempts to answer two related questions on the subject of copyright law in the Internet age:First: Under present U.S. copyright law, does the delivery of a digital music file over the Internet as a "download" necessarily implicate the copyright holder's right of public performance, above and beyond the obviously implicated rights of distribution and reproduction, as the music industry claims it does? This article examines the recent decision in United States v. ASCAP (S.D.N.Y. 2007), which held that it does not. The article also independently applies the major techniques of statutory interpretation to the relevant portions of the Copyright Act, concluding that the court was correct and that such a download should not entail a "public performance" under current law.Second: Should Congress proactively amend the Copyright Act to address this controversy, and if so, how? This article argues that a proactive legislative amendment is necessary to address both the download-as-performance question specifically, and the underlying issue of the ill-suitedness of the traditional distinction between performances and distributions (as well as displays) to the Internet context. It then discusses what an appropriate amendment might look like--specifically, replacing the currently separate rights of reproduction, distribution, and public performance (at least in the Internet context) with a unitary right of "digital communication," and making the operative legal distinction instead one between interactive and non-interactive digital communications, which I argue has been the fundamental conceptual divide all along, and for which the performance/distribution distinction has merely been a convenient proxy. Jonah M. Knobler Intellectual Property Law Copyright Law