Good news and bad news on the intellectual property front
Pamela Samuelson · Communications of the ACM · 1999
The article discusses three legal initiatives, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Collections of Information Antipiracy Act and Article 2B of the Uniform Commercial Code, which are all responses to challenges digital technologies have posed in recent years in the U.S. Digital information is more easily copied and disseminated via global networks than print information. Although digital technologies do present some threats to information providers, policymakers should be careful not to overreact to these threats by adopting overbroad and imbalanced rules that may benefit some industries, but do so to the detriment of other industries, especially those in emerging markets and to the detriment of the public. Experiences with each of the legal initiatives discussed in the article demonstrates that the threat of overreaction is more than hypothetical. In the last year, some progress has been made in developing more balanced rules and in rejecting highly imbalanced rules.