Copyright in the networked world: technology and consumer rights in copyright

Early copyright laws said little about the rights of consumers. In general, the law in each country gave an exclusive, short‐term right to make copies of the work as a whole. The periods were so short, and the copying technology so slow that non‐commercial copying mattered little. In the nineteenth century case law in the USA and elsewhere began to develop consumer rights. The best known of these were codified as “fair use” in the 1976 US law as section 107. In recent years, new technologies have made copyright holders fearful that consumer rights would encourage theft and undermine the economic value of their work. This paper looks at the technological basis of that fear and some of the proposed solutions.