Expansion Of The Copyright Act Of 1790 (2)

Introduction: As technology has progressed, copyright has become a fairly contested area and needs to adapt as a result of these advancements. This policy memo serves to discuss the key failings of current copyright law, such as an ambiguity, inconsistent protection, and lengthy copyright periods that go against its intended purpose of fostering useful arts and sciences, and provides a policy recommendation on copyright reform that would mitigate these problems. These policy recommendations involve clarifying the definition of fair use, expanding the public domain, and making copyright charges proportional to those being fined. Section I provides an overview of the current legislation and historical approaches regarding copyright law. Section

The primary purpose of the latter was to encourage learning by securing a creator the rights to their work for 14 years, and allowing a renewal if the creator is alive for another 14 years. The Copyright Act of 1976 recognized the advancements in technology occuring at the time, including television, radio, motion pictures, and sound recordings. It detailed the exclusive rights of copyright holders to reproduce their work, creative derivative forms of their work, perform and display their work publically, and commercialize their work. It also greatly expanded the previous length of term to the life of the creator plus 50 years. Later this was amended by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 to 70 years for works made after 1978 [1]. The important Fair Use doctrine was codified, and detailed the ways in which and existing work could be used by someone other than the creator. Fair Use applies explicitly to purposes that include “reporting, criticism, research, scholarship or teaching”. To determine fair use, the work is tested to clarify the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount of the original work used, and the effect of the use upon the original work in the market

Penalties for copyright infringement cases have continued to rise, with some cases requiring as much as 150,000 dollars per work. Even settling cases may result in a fine of 10,000 dollars. Many creators or consumers charged cannot afford a lawyer, and plaintiffs may not be able to press charges even in cases of pure infringement. A single mother, accused with sharing 24 songs outside of fair use, is being charged six figures for songs that total about 24 dollars retail value [10][3]. This can dissuade the legal spread of information and creation of works, or the defense of one’s work. One proposed solution is to scale the penalties for infringement proportional to the actual case and market damage caused, and not start at six figures. Another option is to follow the C.A.S.E. Act proposed by Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Tom Marino, and create a small claims court facilitated by the Copyright Office. The purpose of this court would be to similarly reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of these infringement cases. This would benefit creators by making it less intimidating to deal with work that may or may not fall under fair use, and help copyright owners more easily defend their work from being used outside of fair use