Rights to anything are defined by the public authorities of a country in which the thing is located. Rights to a literary or artistic work are no different and can only apply to works in a particular country. As this did not promote commerce, in 1886 the Berne Convention for…
Opening Content Protection
MP3 has shown that the combination of technology and user needs can create mass phenomena behaving like a hydra. For every head of the MP3 hydra that is cut by a court sentence, two new heads appear. How to fight the MP3 hydra, then? Some people have fought it with…
Technology, Society and Law
When radio and television broadcasting were introduced, it was reasonable to expect that physical forms of distribution would eventually disappear. Why should people pay for something when the same thing is available for free over the air? This down-to-earth consideration, however, turned out to be wrong, because people listening to…
The World After MP3
MP3 has shown how the expectations of rights holders concerning the use of digital content clash with those of billions of end users. In this chapter I would like to summarise the views from the perspective of the different players. I will classify the attitudes in four categories: philosophical, technological, political…