Focus 580; Intellectual Property and the Internet

While in this part of focus 580 will be talking about intellectual property and the Internet. With the coming of the Internet with the coming of more and more ways to obtain and exchange different kinds of information and including things like music and movies and books and magazine articles a newspaper often all kinds of things that now that people can obtain them store them pass them around electronically. It has proposed a number of new and sometimes thorny questions having to do with intellectual property and copyright issues. So we're trying to talk about some of these things this morning with our guest He's Jay caisson and he's professor of law at the University of Illinois in addition to having an appointment in the College of Law. He also has positions in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs so you can see how these issues cross a number of disciplines. He is a graduate of Georgetown Law School but he also has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin. And in fact before

he decided to go to law school he worked for IBM as a research scientist. He has been with us before on the program to talk about some of these issues and was good enough to come back. And we'll let take up a number of things and what we want to make sure the people who are listening know that as always is the case if you have a specific or particular kind of question you are invited to call and. And I know that he will do his best to give you an answer. The number here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. We also have a toll free line good anywhere that you can hear us and that is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. So again three three three W I L L and toll free 800 2 2 2 0. Well thanks very much for being here. Yeah thank you and thank you for inviting me for a for people who don't deal with these issues all the time on a regular basis. Maybe we should just talk a little bit about what it is we're talking about for first off to for people who may feel this sounds sort of esoteric and perhaps not even sure when we talk when you use a phrase like intellectual property. What is it that you're talking about.

You know well basically when we're talking about property people often think of the real property. Think of a house they think of a chair or an apple. If you're eating and they don't think of the property as being something that could be intangible something that you can't touch as a Sara Lee and intangible property is sometimes referred to as intellectual property simply because it involves the creative process and involves some process of creating something an idea and so on and so forth. And we have come to believe that we ought to have property rights in these things and this is not a new idea. Things related to electro property they didn't call it that has been around for several centuries. Goes back to Roman times in Venetian times when people understood that if you created something new you ought to have a right to it. Indeed in our constitution it's one of the few things where an explicit right has been provided for in the Constitution and indeed the reason for that right is also made very clear for example

in Article 1 Section 8 Clause 8 it says to promote the Progress of Science and the useful arts. We give authors and inventors some exclusive rights to their writings and their creations for. A limited period of time. You know the words exact idea that you ought to encourage the creation of these works by giving some sort of exclusive right to that work or that creation for a period of time so that they can enjoy some rights to exclude others was well understood from day one by our forefathers founding fathers. Well we there are a couple of basic ways that we can protect these things if you invent something or even if you actually don't even have to make it. If you come up with an idea for an invention some sort of new product if you can describe it and if it's unique you can get a patent. So then you own that. And if somebody comes along and takes your idea and makes it you can do you can take legal action

if you if you write a book. You can get a copyright which is essentially the same sort of idea so that if for example I write a book and it gets published then I have the right to the proceeds and if somebody else should come along go to the bookstore buy a copy of my book and go down to Kinko's and make copies and set up a little stand on the sidewalk and sell it. You can't do that so we have copyright protection. But now how to. How is it that now when we come along and we have the Internet and we now have it so that say. Well maybe I read something that I thought that was really interesting could be an entire article could be something pretty substantial and and I'd think that to be interesting for you to read and so electronically send you a copy. Why is it that somehow the existing laws don't cover the reality that now exist. Well I mean before we go and dump an

existing law which I think it is OK to dump on you know we have to realize the World Wide Web is only five or six years old and and we're talking about relatively new things. The law is much slower to change and the reality is that we're talking about a medium that has enormous distribution capabilities and enormous replication capabilities and all. Capable of being done perfectly thanks to digital technology this is something that really was not anticipated and so the ability of the medium to transmit to vast amounts of content is truly amazing. And that's one thing that does distinguish intellectual property from real property in a sense. If there is a seat in a bus if one person sits in that seat it's taken it's gone nobody else can. If you have an apple you eat it it's gone and intellectual property is fundamentally different that way. It's not like real property multiple people can use it at the same time multiple

people can take it and without diminishing the original work. In other words if I ate the apple apples gone no one else can he did. But it's not true with respect to a book you can make multiple copies of the book and the book still remains the same. And so I think fundamental difference in combination with the enormous communication capabilities of the Internet is posing all kinds of challenges to people who are creators of works. People are worried that their ability to appropriate the benefits of their hard work is being taken away from them. On the other hand. If you are someone who believes that. They do have a right to profit from their work but our ability to access to work for fair use and other purposes are not to be taken away. After all in the process of creating new works we rely on old works so dissemination is something that's very very important as well. And this is something that lies at the heart of intellectual property which is

something that people often miss and that is that intellectual property is not about protection. It's sort of like saying criminal law is about the rights of defendants. It's simply is not. Or say that Constitutional law is about the rights of the federal government it's not. It's about a balance between federal government state government it's about a balance between rights of defendants and victims and here in this case it's a right about. It's about a balance between the rights of creators and users and and it's sort of striking a balance between if you will progress and access. So you want to promote progress by encouraging authors and mentors by the same time you need to have access to the works and things like That's why you're probably fundamentally trying to strike that balance with concepts like fair use with concepts like experimental use in patents and so on. And with rights for parody commentary and so on where you don't worry about trademark violations and so on. And it just is. As far as that the law is concerned the basic point that we are where we find ourselves

now is that it is an area that has been that as this technology has changed so much so quickly that the law is still there and people who make law and who think about the law are still trying to figure out how exactly to deal with this. Even now as we speak changing developing reality. Yeah I mean I mean you know as an engineer I was so often used to thinking of unintended consequences of technology. Now I've come to realize that that's not just the exclusive province of technology. There's unintended consequences of laws being passed by Congress and other people as well. And they don't anticipate that a law that was you know passed three or four years ago now is going to be applied in entirely different situations that was not contemplated by Congress at the outset. And we're talking this morning with Jay case and he is a professor of law at University of Illinois. He also has positions in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs and he teaches and writes on the areas of intellectual property and law and regulation of cyberspace as well as science and

technology and the law. And here we're talking this morning trying to talk a little bit about some of the issues some of the intellectual property issues raised. By the Internet and if you have questions we have a couple of people here ready to go. You're certainly welcome to call here in Champaign Urbana 3 3 3 0 or 9 4 5 5. We do also have toll free line. That's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. We'll start here though with someone locally. The caller is in her Bana one number one. Hello. You said something about that it's not so much protection of the copyright holders and patent holders how people mind if I take a little issue with that at least as far as current case law goes from something like nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine thousand ninety eight. The average copyright was extended about 80 years during a period of only 89 years which basically wipes out that quote that you mentioned in the Constitution

that says for a limited amount of time. The World Intellectual Property Organization makes no bones about the fact that they would like to have permanent copyright and certainly going from an average copyright of say 15 years in 1900 to an average copyright of 95 years now. Makes it so that if you take your kid to see The Lion King or something when they're five years old that they would have to live to be 100 years old before they could legally make some kind of offshoot copy of that and use it. To make their all work you know and Disney of course is famous for making movies out of Mark Twain stories and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and all this other stuff that was in the public domain but obviously Mark Twain would not have been in the public domain if they had a 95 year copyright at the time. So they're kind of have their own have their bread buttered on both sides.

I won't argue with you about the fact that these very long terms the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act one of the last things that Sonny Bono did as a gift to his buddies in the entertainment industry is something that is very hard to justify. And I was referring to the balance I was referring to in principle that's what intellectual property is designed to do. The fact that in certain specific situations they don't do it. I totally agree with you that it was a copyright term extension was entirely unjustified. I want to make one point there that I think I urge people like you to keep in mind is and that is that we have. Problem with intellectual property legislation in this country which is that we have a bunch of groups that are very well coordinated and very well funded and who make it a point to make sure that their interests are heard. And then you have the vast disperse and uncoordinated group the public

and so as a result those people who study the legislative processes and the use was a term that's called public choice theory which explains how certain laws come about. And when you have different kinds of stakeholders are dispersed set of stakeholders in a well coordinated set of stakeholders that well coordinated efforts always wins right. And in this case what you end up with is legislation where the import of what you're saying is not made available to people who are voting on these things. And after all congressmen know that their re-election chances do not depend on whether how they vote on an intellectual property. So as a result you know they're perfectly happy to perfectly happy to kowtow to the lobbying interests. Yeah OK. He could still hear me. Yeah. For example you know Robert James Waller is going to make a hundred million dollars off of a hundred pages of Madison County and generation after generation after generation of his

offspring are going to basically be the landed gentry of the information age from from one work that they have taken him a couple months to write. There is no other job you could possibly have in the world that could do that. Michael Jordan still has to come back and play more basketball if he wants to get to know 50 million dollars a year to do that. And you also mention music I think you know that like Napster. I think that some of what's going on on the Internet is a rebellion against these trends. As I recall the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA whatever it stands for 60 percent of them were convicted for price fixing and still never to the prices of CDs haven't come down. And as you probably know you can make your own CD on your own computer for sometimes as little as a dime. So somewhere a $17 CD isn't getting anywhere near $700 to the artists who made it.

Let me just try and respond to a few of the points that you make. You are absolutely correct that some authors do profit a great deal but keep in mind that people who are creators and inventors don't know that their work is going to be profitable or not there's lots of books written and lots of inventions made and lots of patents that are granted that are entirely worthless that have absolutely no market exceptions whatsoever. So the fact that some of them are winners and some of them are magnificent winners is just the way it turns out that then protecting only the very richest of the rich. You're absolutely right 99 percent of all the books published this year will not be in print as long as the Bridges of Madison County are right but keep in mind that nobody is forcing anyone to buy Madison County or any other book. It's only when the books are bought that the person is actually making some money otherwise they don't make any money. Let's say I bought a copy of Gone With The Wind in 1939 and the copyright law then was 28 years with a possible 28 year extension. Now under

that law I have got a right to copy that book 56 years later and sell my own EDITION. Now obviously that's never going to happen because every time any of them works from the thirties or the forties get closer sorry the 30s or the 20s. Now the Golden Age of movies and stuff like that get close to begin the public domain. Somebody like Sonny Bono comes along and jacks it up higher because of Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh and stuff like that from one hundred twenty six thousand twenty seven. So those things help. Disney paid something like 200 million dollars for the rights to Winnie the Pooh. Two years ago or something because of the own their own legislation to extend the copyright. Now if they can afford to spend two hundred million dollars for copyright of one single set of characters they're for Winnie the Pooh then you can imagine what kind of money they can put into Congress to make sure that they never listen to us. I couldn't get a hold of any congressman's ear when the Sonny Bono law was coming up and I don't know if you are aware of it or not but that law was passed within 24 hours of

when Clinton was impeached. As a matter of fact not only do I know about the law but actually signed on to a bunch of 150 intellectual property law professors who tried to do our best to explain the dislike. Quite nonsensical so you guys are not disagreeing with the caller not disagreeing. But he can tell you that he didn't get any mileage out of those hundred fifty people. Yeah well I mean in part it's important that all of us speak up and you know and that's the fact that we sometimes win and lose. Makes us a good democracy pluralistic society some us some Sometimes you win sometimes you lose. You never win on copyright. Not in this last century. Not since Gutenberg when Gutenberg came along. You got books for the masses and that created the first of our current copyright laws and when the steam electric presses came along at the turn of the last century

and created all those reprint houses in one thousand nine copyright law killed them off when the Xerox machine came along the 1976 Copyright killed off the use of that and now the Internet is come along. The 1908 law kills off what you can put on there. There are millions of books that you can't put on the internet just because of those laws that I just mentioned and obviously there were more. Millions of books that could be on the Internet free of charge that are only covered by these copyright laws because you could copy them. It wasn't illegal when it was hard. But only the rich people could make copies before Gutenberg. There was no real copyright at all. And as everything every time you get a nasty movement. Remember that the term you used. But you know the new technology revolution. Obviously Gutenberg was one and the steam electric presses are one of the Xerox machine was one and the Internet was one. Each time that happens they pass a law against it and just it's OK you know we can have a public

domain as long as the public can't really have the public domain. I'd probably take it off. Well I'm going to have a couple of other people here I want to get to I don't know if you want to make any further I don't want to just make a couple of very quick points and first that you should keep in mind by the way that whenever you have an intellectual property work whether it's a copyright on a book or whether it's a patent for an invention the term simply is a period of time and you could exercise that right doesn't mean by the way that after 18 months or two years there's anybody who even wants to buy your book and it doesn't mean that after a year or two your path. You may have a patent for 20 years from the date of filing but keep in mind that people should want to use your patented product or other products that are good better and in this fast information technology age obsolescence of products is very very fast it's just a few years. So so you know too much emphasis on term is is can be a little deceiving. A couple other things that I wanted to mention the caller mention Michael Jordan I show you Michael Jordan has the finest

intellectual property attorneys in the country and and in the contracts that he signs I've seen some of the sports contracts when I was in private practice they are wonderfully protective of all his intellectual property rights he does not need to come back to play basketball to make money. And finally as far as Napster goes I do agree with the caller that one of the real issues in the Napster case is the role of the middleman. And this is often ignored. It is not the artists the artists can get paid through the Internet. They can set up their own websites and they can have people pay for it and sell it directly. Ultimately it's the middlemen like RIAA who are being threatened by the Internet. This is not about people who want to enjoy music they're willing to pay for it. And and let's keep in mind that the prices of this comes down when you have when transaction costs are produced in the ability to replicate is reduced you might be able to actually pay pennies for songs. And so I agree with the caller that ultimately it is about creators being rewarded and it's the middlemen

who are being squeezed out who are now trying to use every tactic they can. By the way this is not just an intellectual property problem happens to be the middleman with respect to video and music content. But this is true for a small vineyards in California that want to sell through the Internet big vineyards have gone and lobby Congress and they have used the fact that you don't want to sell alcohol to minors as a ploy to try to prevent the small vineyards from selling through the Internet. You know the car dealerships are doing the same to mean car dealerships are being squeezed out and they're being they're acting to prevent car companies from directly selling through the Internet. So so I mean the fact is that middlemen are being squeezed all around and. They don't like it. We are at our midpoint already. Our guest is Jay case and he's professor of law at University of Illinois he teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property and also the regulation of cyberspace for talking a bit this morning about intellectual property and the Internet. Then your

questions are welcome. We have some other folks here ready to go next caller is Belgium. Why number four. Yes. I don't truly understand the thing about this intellectual property and stuff. Somebody of your paper Mona Lisa Carey and somebody comes and looks at this time the person looks at it. He doesn't have to pay for it. But you know why should the song have more protection. And same way that you know I don't understand this thing you know. But that's not considered valuable but a person makes a song it's considered valuable. Can you explain this to me. There is nothing to prevent you from hearing a song the same way as there is nothing to prevent you from seeing the Mona Lisa. The only issue is are you allowed to make multiple copies of the song and multiple copies of the Mona Lisa and try to sell

it and distribute it and so on. So it's reproduction right. And it's the public performances and the public display right and the right to make future works based on this work. Those are where intellectual property comes in. I mean you're absolutely allowed to listen to whatever you want and you're absolutely allowed to say whatever you want. There's nobody stopping you from doing that. That's true that's not exactly the point I'm making. There are artists that made them only. It was paid to make Mona Lisa and he gave it away. OK and to the person who bought it and it became a famous work of art but eventually accepted the money and went down the road was happy. Gentleman made writes a song. He goes to some brain cells that song to somebody and says OK this is a good song fine and he just paid for it. Why after that initial compensation why does it have to continue want forever and ever and ever. I think you know the confusion that you're having is a legitimate one and it's a very common one and that is the difference between the intellectual property right and what

your copy and what you have the right to do with your copy. In other words if I buy a book I have a copy of the book and I have paid for it and so I have the right to use the book any which way I want for my own. Joy and pleasure and similarly if I pay for a copy of the Mona Lisa I'm allowed to do whatever I want with my copy. What I'm not allowed to do and that's equal in both cases what I'm not allowed to do now is to start using my Xerox machine and scanning the book in. And just like I'm not allowed to scan the Mona Lisa. In other words you have paid for the right to use that copy it's called the first sale doctrine and you can do whatever you want with your copy of that song or that so on and so forth where things come in is when you take that and you start impinging on the broader right to reproduce and to distribute copies of that

work which of course still belongs the intellectual property right to that work still belongs with the creator and he has not given that right to you he's simply given you a copy of his creation even though he never makes another. You have been correct. That's his prerogative. He doesn't need to. He you know I can write one book I can make one copy and I can give it to you for a dollar. I still own the copyright. Thank you very much Aaron. I think you know maybe again that the difference is that it's it's a different world now than it was when Davinci painted the Mona Lisa and and perhaps then crafts people did have the idea that when you create something you sell it and then it's gone you have no more right. But nowadays that we have a very different sort of idea that says that used to the creative or work creative or work may indeed sign some rights away and may indeed sign to a sign to someone else the right to duplicate and sell it. However there's still this idea that the creator still retains some right to that thing.

And and of course in the I mean in the case of if if I. Write a book and it's in Simon and Schuster publishes the book and then somebody violates the copyright. Simon and Schuster are the guys that are going to come after you not not me but it's still the case that that I do still retain some right even though I have entered into this contract your relationship with Simon and Schuster and they're going to pay me some money and they're going to distribute the work. Absolutely. And of course there is still commonality in the sense that the creator of the Mona Lisa. I mean he does get paid when the work is commissioned. The royal family's did pay these artists and more importantly they made sure that the right of attribution was maintained in other words. It's very important that they indicated that this was the artist who did it. The royal family didn't come along and take his name off and put their name on and they didn't try and deface the work and things like that and the integrity of the work was maintained. So it's not just about making money it's about rights of attribution it's about integrity and I and other things which we've known for a

long time. Yeah. And that's also there. There are other cases where people have made the argument there for example if you if you make a painting and I buy it from you and I decide that I think the color should be different and paint over it then you could come back to me and say no you can't do that. The fact that you own it and that I paid for it gives me the right to have it and display it but not to change it. Right. Absolutely I mean within within limits of course allowed to doodle in a book that you buy and so on but but but you but you are correct that there are certain rights of contribution and rights of integrity in the work as a whole which survive any kind of transfer. OK well let's talk with some of the folks here I guess next will be champagne lying too. Hello. Fine too. Yes hi. This has been a really interesting conversation I appreciate the guest talking about some things I was a little concerned of at first but your your perspective really reassured

me that some of the callers have been basically treating ideas as if they're less valuable than any other product or service that human beings create and I think that's that might be one of the big problems. Ideas are valuable RDA ideas are the products that some people produce some people produce. You know they give you hamburger when you give them a dollar 15 some people produce a tangible product. Lot of other people produce ideas and that's the difference. Failure to support the right for people to protect the right ideas is simply theft. In my book personal opinion here Napster is theft because it's encouraging people to steal music without paying somebody for it. Now you get into the argument of the middlemen and all that business well you know that's a whole nother question. But the fact is that somebody should be getting compensated where owns the rights to that idea. Getting back to the idea of you know getting away from the music and in entertainment industry I think that's a and easy target to pick on. My business is is

doing research in creating training programs for organizations. I don't come up with a lot of brand new ideas myself but what I do is I take the ideas from tens twenties hundreds of other researchers combine it together in a new way and that is a unique product. I always always always give credit to the people who I do research from that's ethical. It's just and it gives people the right credit if I'm going to take more than a cup. The sentences were a paragraph. You know I want to make sure I get permission to be able to do that because somebody spent their time energy and effort doing that research. If I didn't it would be literally theft. From that person and preventing them from doing their livelihood. And I think that's a big big misconception that people saying oh well these rules are ridiculous. Wrong. They are protecting people's livelihood. Otherwise it's just simply theft it's using somebody else's ideas to you know market themselves them and proffer for them as if they were your own. You use them

for your own you know personal situations with within a private relationship. You know I'm sharing this quote with a friend. No I don't have to worry about giving somebody a note. Haitian citation or even even even a dollar a royalty. But on the other hand if I'm going to go ahead and make a profit on that. That presentation and I'm going to go ahead and use somebody else's material to make money for myself. It is just just right and ethical that I go ahead and compensate that person. So there's a perspective I haven't heard from callers yet so far. I wanted to toss that out there and just see what your reaction is so I'll let you respond. Thank you very much. I actually will not get any complaints from me and virtually anything you said. I do agree with you that ideas around the world ideas are important and free writing is. That's what economists call it is a serious problem that's why we have intellectual property laws. We have intellectual property law so that when you put an idea out there people can are massively appropriated without paying you because what ends up

happening then is that those ideas become undervalued and they're what economists call our public goods. And when you have public goods then the production of these becomes diminished because those things are not valued by society. And if inventions and you know nations are not valued by society then people are going to try to as a rational matter they're going to try to engage in doing other things that are more valuable and they're not going to innovate and they're not going to. So I do agree with you as a matter of fact the analogy to past doesn't really carry it as far as it should. When you think of theft you just think of one time stealing. That's the problem with intellectual property there's multiple stealing multiple times and the thing still remains is that you can continue to go on and on and on. So theft is is actually doesn't do justice to the amount of stealing that you can do with intellectual property. As far as Napster goes I agree with you I think Napster definitely was engaging in illegal conduct but I think that it's a little bit

disingenuous to say that it's the creators of the work who are being deprived of their ability to profit from it it's not it's RIAA that wants to be in the business of distributing music and distributing content that's the people who really want to do it because you can use Napster and you can still have creators getting rewarded. After all if you go to a site called after Napster dot com. You'll see that there is 25 different services that offer peer to peer file sharing and to review the various consumers rating each and every one of them. It was about 25 of them last time I checked and one of and there are several others audio galaxy and so on that seem to work pretty well. So there are perfectly legal ways of doing the things that Nasser intended to do and I think the important thing to realize is that the creators of the music that work the content ought to be rewarded. And but at the same time we ought to be careful that the wonderful and edges of the medium which allow a lot of transaction costs to go away and a lot of these middlemen do get squeezed out.

You shouldn't take the refuge of the law you know and basically prevent the Internet from becoming a more efficient medium which is really what it's all about. And of course you know one of things we haven't really touched on and we may not have time to but it's always going to be the case that they're going to people that are going to be pushing the envelope they're going to be trying to getting around you know as you said is we're just kind of getting ready to talk one of the big stories in this field these days is things that people do to try to get around the systems that creators and distributors use to try to prevent copying. It's like the you know. I go out to buy a DVD and set it home and watch that. But the DVD people who sold me that don't want me making copies passing them out to my friends or making copies and selling them which is of course a huge worldwide is a huge huge problem. But it's so they put something on there to try to prevent me from doing that. And of course there's always going to be somebody coming along trying to figure out some way and people already have figured out a way to

get around that. And it seems like the this is these forces are constantly going to be sort of pursuing one another. You're absolutely right. And in the case of DVDs they have something called a content scrambling system CFS. And there was a Norwegian group that called itself a Masters of reverse engineering that came up with a decent C Ss that tried to defeat the technology protection device essentially and a mode of encryption that was put on there by in order to prevent the copying of DVDs. But the important thing there to keep in mind is and this is something that Congress did not realize when it passed in 1980 a DMCA Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Title 1 of that act. Makes it illegal to circumvent any kind of technological protection measure. The problem that Congress did not anticipate was that there are some legitimate and legal uses of the

content that are now precluded because technology is so wonderful at keeping everybody out. There is basically imagine if I were to teach my students how juries deliberate cases and I wanted to get a clip from 12 Angry Men. I couldn't do it. That's fair use. Congress has other laws that says you're perfectly allowed to do that for teaching. Face to face in a classroom. But no I can't get access to it because this technological protection device that they have put in there prevents me from getting access to things that I should be able to get access to. And that's a real problem the real problem is that these kinds of laws that are passed by Congress which basically says all these technological protection measures are OK essentially do away with things like fair use and do away with balance. And that is at the heart of intellectual property law. The balance is so critical. I mean I can give you a number of other examples where basically. You know there

was a famous case where a gentleman was testifying. He was a researcher at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and he was testifying in the Washington Redskins case and he wanted to go through a whole bunch of old movies to show that the term Redskin is a disparaging term and he couldn't go through a whole bunch of movies and get access just to prove his point. And he couldn't do it because of Title One of the DMCA which is this anti circumvention law. And so that's where things sort of like somebody saying hey you know you have national parks and you're allowed to enjoy it and then suddenly can somebody comes around and puts a fence around the national parks and keeps me out you know and and doesn't give me the barbed wires to cut through it. You know that what they'll do that every time you go in they'll charge you. That's right. We have a number of other callers Jason is our guest He's a professor of law at the University of Illinois also has positions in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs in his particular areas of interest are indeed intellectual property

law and the regulation of cyberspace as well as science technology and the law. And we're talking about intellectual property and the Internet and we have a number of callers and we'll try to get in at least a couple more in the time that remain. The next person in line would be Line 1 in Urbana. Hello. Yeah two questions. One one relating to MIT's decision to put their entire were kind of put their own curriculum on the line and off far they've gotten with that but I know that one of the issues that that brought up was that the professors themselves felt that some of their rights were being eroded. In their intellectual property I was wondering if you had any info on that. And then the other question would be. Some of the internet forums where

people subscribe to a forum and put in their comments. Who owns that. Does anyone really have a right to do that. So the contribution. You know the people who contribute to them are the core of the host of the form. So am I to the forums. Yeah as far as putting the syllabus online goes I think actually that was something that was beginning to happen and it really was something that MIT took advantage of to give themselves a lot of good publicity by putting all the syllabus online the important thing to keep in mind here is that it's a little bit deceiving to say that you're putting all the syllabus online. The ultimate question is whether we can download everything that is there in the syllabus and we then have the right to distribute it and give it to our

students. In other words so what if you are able to provide me with a list of copyrighted works that's part of my syllabus. It tells me that that's important but it ultimately only goes that far. I have to be able to get to that copyrighted work and I have to be able to use it in my classroom and make 50 copies and or be able to put it on my website and do I have the right to put it on my website in other words is MIT going to go and get the clearances so that it allows me to use the content which is linked to in the syllabus and so on. So I think it's a wonderful first step and it's and it's I think it's great. And MIT has received a great deal of publicity for it. But keep in mind in that it really doesn't go quite as far as you might think it does. And and so it remains to be seen if they're going to go and get clearances for all of us to go and use the content not just simply the link to the content. And the second point with respect to the authorship you are absolutely correct that is a gray area. Traditionally

academics have been a loophole if you will or a clear exception that the courts have carved out and they've basically said Well typically when you work for a company all your work is a work for hire and it's owned by the company. But in the case of academics they have understood that in order to promote academic freedom and in order to allow academia to be an attractive job in a way all the works that are created by professors typically are owned by the professors. Not by the universities This is typically related to Course materials books they write articles they write and so on. One clear exception to that has always been inventions which has traditionally been owned by the university. Now the question is Where does online content come in. Where does it fall is it going to be treated in a patent centric paradigm where the university owns everything or a copyright centric paradigm where professors own everything. That is very much a topic that is heavily debated and bottom line is that universities see distribution of course where an online

content as being a way to generate a lot of revenue and that wasn't the case before and they see that there is now been essentially a paradigm change. And so there are less willing to give professors the complete rights to online content. With respect to courses as far as the chat forums and so on Typically you are correct in that. A copyrighted work in a chat forum is owned by the people who are typically setting up a church chat forum or somebody else. Keep in mind by the way that anything everything you say is not capable of copyright protection. In other words. There has to be a certain amount of minimum expression before it something can be copyrighted. Nobody has a copyright to it was a dark and rainy night or William Gibson doesn't have the copyright to the word cyberspace which is used for the first time in his 1984 book Neuromancer. So it's a so it doesn't mean that we all have to

pay William Gibson one cent when we use the word cyberspace. It's actually so their little contributions that are made by people in the chat forum would not be individually copyrightable highly unlikely. So you're saying that if there were a particularly interesting exchanges on one of these forums between two or three contributors and if I wanted to copy that out I really need a permission. The people that set up the form in the first place. Well that depends. I would say that if you wanted to reproduce a small part of it you definitely want to check with the people in the forum but it depends if you're going just going to take two or three lines you probably without knowing enough are like three or four paragraphs. Yeah well you basically what you're saying is aware DOS fair use stop and where does a copyright infringement begin and that's a very question that depends on an IQ and investigation of the facts.

I would say that if you're going to take three or four paragraphs you might want to just shoot off a letter to the chat forum and you'll be pleasantly surprised that there'd be more than happy to let you take three or four paragraphs that usually is not a problem. OK thanks for trying it real quick here one more in Chicago and for Hello. I thought I might mention the following which. Gives you another another angle on the whole business of intellectual property rights. I've got one of my brothers went to work for surveying us a long time ago. Every television tube operation then he went to work for them in upstate New York. Where they manufactured television tubes and after several years he transferred or got transferred out to their plants. Pennsylvania where they manufacture the flashbulbs. They had a problem down there where the

weather tell you they were having something like seven to eight percent breakage lots of waste in the manufacture of flash bulbs and it was costing tons of money and there were months I treat something over a hundred thousand of those flashbulbs. So you can see how it runs up and how you design machinery to produce these flash bulbs which cut the wastage down to less than 1 percent. And of course made them lots of money. Not only that but the sinuses. Of heat this machinery be permitted to go into the manufacture. Flash switch would have been well to not have been feasible before that and it made lots more money. He was rewarded with a letter of thanks. Of course he had signed away the patent rights and all that when he went to work for them and were kind of get the point where he kind of got a rep up I guess.

Mike your question would be Is that still the way it is in industry as there is that started to change. Well it actually has changed. And certainly you can try and choose to work for an employer who has a multi-tiered structure where he basically says you have an invention and if it makes X amount of dollars you get the proverbial hundred dollar check and if it makes more than X you get half a percent and so on. But keep in mind that a lot of this I'm not trying to come to the rescue of Sylvania they can do that themselves. But of course it doesn't even exist anymore. But but what I wanted to say was keep in mind that there's massive R&D costs and there is massive infrastructure that was relied on by your brother and so those are the things that you don't see in other words he could not have done that work without a lot of stuff that was available. And I completely sympathize as a scientist at IBM I obtained several patents

and I did get the equivalent of the word of thanks and this is so and so I do I do understand what you say. Well thanks for being with us I'm sure that we can another day we can find some more issues to talk about but for now we'll have to say thanks. Jason professor of law. Thank you David.