Information Rules

4	Rights Management

Copyright owners continue to be ambivalent about the Internet. On the one hand, it represents a fantastic new medium for distribution; on the other, many in the publishing industry see it as one “giant, out of control copying machine.”

The traditional protections offered by intellectual property law seem powerless to deal with many of the issues raised by digital media. In a widely quoted article, John Perry Barlow asserted that “Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression…. We will need to develop an entirely new set of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances.”¹

Is Barlow right? Is copyright law hopelessly outdated? We think not. As in the ...