tives to promote creativity and the spread of knowledge, not total control in perpetuity. My copyright comrade at NYU, Siva Vaidhyanathan, told me that some professors in India have photocopied his book Copyrights and Copywrongs in its entirety. The cost of a book is almost an entire month’s salary for some university workers in that country, so Siva’s feathers aren’t ruffled over this kind of
“piracy”—though it makes him sad that in the era of globalization such things as books aren’t affordable for certain people.
In this book, I don’t argue for the abolition of intellectual-property laws. Nor do I believe that those who think their intellectual property is worth protecting are automatically “overzealous copyright bozos.” But I do contend that we need to roll back the recent restrictions that have been imposed on us in the digital age.
Today, copyright and trademark owners repeatedly invoke the Internet as something that will surely devastate them. Jack Valenti, the recently retired Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) CEO, has claimed that Hollywood would be brought to its knees by the digital anarchy perpetrated by “twelve-year-olds.” Valenti has argued, “If the value of what [movie studios] labored over and brought forth to entertain the American public cannot be protected by copyright, then the victim is going to be the American public.”
He went on to assert that if people were able to freely copy and watch movies whenever they wanted, this would lead to a “lessened supply of high quality, expensive high budget material where its investment recoupment is now in serious doubt.”6
VALENTI SAID THIS over twenty years ago, and he was talking about the VCR.
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