Article
Building Universal Digital Libraries: An Agenda for Copyright Reform
Pepp. L. Rev.
(2006)
Abstract
This article proposes a series of copyright reforms to pave the way for digital library projects like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Print, which promise to make much of the world's knowledge easily searchable and accessible from anywhere. Existing law frustrates digital library growth and development by granting overlapping, overbroad, and near-perpetual copyrights in books, art, audiovisual works, and digital content. Digital libraries would benefit from an expanded public domain, revitalized fair use doctrine and originality requirement, rationalized systems for copyright registration and transfer, and a new framework for compensating copyright owners for online infringement without imposing derivative copyright liability on technologists. This article's case for reform begins with rolling back the copyright term extensions of recent years, which were upheld by the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Reno. Indefinitely renewable copyrights threaten to marginalize Internet publishing and online libraries by entangling them in endless disputes regarding the rights to decades- or centuries-old works. Similarly, digital library projects are becoming unnecessarily complicated and expensive to undertake due to the assertion by libraries and copyright holding companies of exclusive rights over unoriginal reproductions of public domain works, and the demands of authors that courts block all productive digital uses of their already published but often out-of-print works.
Keywords
- Copyright,
- First Amendment,
- Internet,
- cyberspace,
- digital,
- library,
- libraries,
- fair use,
- Grokster,
- Aimster,
- originality,
- registration,
- recordation,
- Google,
- Archive,
- Gutenberg,
- Congress,
- Supreme
Disciplines
Publication Date
2006
Citation Information
Hannibal Travis Building Universal Digital Libraries: An Agenda for Copyright Reform, 33 Pepp. L. Rev. Iss. 4 (2006)
Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol33/iss4/1