For the first 99 percent of its history, Copyright Law could probably proclaim that it was the quietest, calmest backwater of all law practice areas.? Copyright Law was eminently predictable, including the nature of the issues that might be litigated (rarely).? For the most part, it meant filing a copyright application with the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress and imprinting a copyright notice on a publication.? What few copyright lawyers there were lived long, peaceful, stress-free, low pulse rate lives unencumbered by the high tension and uncertainty attendant on so many other practice areas.? Not anymore.
What Has Changed?
Six phenomena account for most of what happened to turn one of the sleepiest legal practice areas into one of the most dynamic disciplines of the 21st century: (1) The Internet; (2) globalization; (3) Media Diversification; (4) The New Corporate Asset Mix; (5) English, the ?Lingua Franca;? and (6) The Decline of Ethics.
1.????? The Internet
The Internet has made the ?priestly? monopoly on knowledge and information obsolete.? In the Middle Ages and even beyond, it was the clergy who acted as the repository of all human knowledge and who were the interpreters of that knowledge for the unwashed and illiterate masses.? It was the churches that housed the great libraries that preserved that knowledge.
The invention of movable type and the printing press changed all that.? But it still took several hundred years for information to trickle down below the royals and the aristocracy.? Universal public education was the next big move toward the expansion of the knowledge society into the lower reaches of the public.
The personal computer, the communications revolution and cheap connectivity put the final nail in the coffin of priestly knowledge preserves.? Of course, over the centuries, the ?priesthood? evolved from actual clerics to include guilds, medical and legal professionals, colleges and universities and other repositories of specialized information and its application to human behavior.? Now anyone can have access to all of the accumulated knowledge and information humanity has amassed and aggregated since the dawn of time (regardless of whether you fix that staring point 13 billion or six thousand years ago).? Intermediaries have lost their exclusive role as midwives of knowledge and information.
While ultimately the demise of the middleman may be the greatest threat of all to the continued existence of the legal profession, that time is some ways off at the moment.? In the interim, the profession is wrestling daily with the vexing problem of how to protect the proprietary nature of the immensity of information assaulting us from all corners of the digital age.? That is where Copyright Law comes into play in new, dynamic and interesting ways.
2.????? Globalization
The contraction of the planet, in terms of both transportation and communications, has also boosted Copyright Law.? No longer is it only big business that sells its products and services globally.? Medium-size and small businesses now do so as well, due to the ease with which products can move across borders and the seamless ease and real-time alacrity that permit services and information to do likewise.
Since so many corporate assets today are intellectual property and intangibles, ease of transborder movement has a much larger globalization effect than it did a quarter century ago when more than two-thirds of corporate assets were tangible ones.? This stunning reversal of the asset mix will only continue to skew in favor of intangibles.
3.????? Media Diversification
Until quite recently, copyright meant protecting authors and publishers of books.? While print products still comprise the plurality of copyrightable materials, they are rapidly losing their predominance.? Ebooks, music, art, architecture, films, videos, even pantomimes can now be copyrighted.? Works of authorship today come in many different forms unimaginable only a few decades ago.
4.????? The New Corporate Asset Mix
With hard goods and IP/intangibles having flip-flopped in terms of corporate asset percentages, the need to protect this now predominant asset class looms very large in corporate strategic and tactical planning.? After all, this is where current and future revenues are going to originate.? The economic downturn has given this policy shift even greater urgency.
5.????? English, the ?Lingua Franca?
I had lunch this week with a recent biomechanical engineering graduate who is about to embark on a three-month internship in Munich.? Not only does the small company for which he will intern do all of its business in English; it turns out that all of the employees communicate with each other in English as well.
English has gradually become the lingua franca of global commerce.? Moreover, it is rapidly becoming the second language of several billion Chinese and Indian students.? The United States may be in decline, but its language is likely to prevail globally for a much longer time.
This means that more and more scientific and other journals, papers, treatises, monographs, books, etc., are being written in English, and that means more copyright work for English-speaking attorneys.
6.????? The Decline of Ethics
Situational ethics across the globe have deteriorated to the point where the vast majority of people see nothing wrong with ripping off other individuals? creative accomplishments.? Most people view others? intellectual property as ripe for the plucking and do not give a second thought to the fact that they are doing something both unethical and illegal.? They see no distinction between private property and the public domain and proceed to violate both God?s and man?s laws with arrogant impunity.
The same holds true for organizations.? For example, a random ?walk? through several U.S. law school websites invariably turns up this particular author?s (my) copyrighted material, although I have neither been asked for permission to reprint my intellectual property nor licensed the offending institutions.
A U.S. Failure to Regulate
It is precisely this fraudulent behavior that stopped the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate sister bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in their tracks several weeks ago, due to the intense lobbying against them by the likes of Wikipedia, Google and other facilitators of Internet copyright theft.? Wrapping themselves in the Free Speech provisions of the First Amendment, they successfully stymied the only chance IP owners had to put a halt to the rampant thievery that goes on daily on the Internet.
U.S. law schools are hardly the only perpetrators of intellectual property theft.? An attorney for a major U.S. publishers? trade association travels annually to China in a futile effort to lobby the Chinese government to crack down on copyright pirates who advertise their wares in hundreds of kiosks circumscribing Beijing?s Tienanmen Square, among other Chinese sites, both fixed facility and online.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
Last month, the United States and seven other countries (Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea) signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an accord that targets intellectual property piracy.?? There are pluses and minuses galore to this agreement.? Among the former are (1) the fact that it represents a multilateral effort to fight a global problem that knows no borders, and (2) that it is an attempt to export something resembling the U.S. enforcement regime internationally.? While that regime is feeble at best, it is nevertheless better than anything that any other nation has devised.? The biggest minus is that China, the mother of all IP thieves, is not a signatory.? The deal is open for signing until May 2013, but don?t expect China to sign onto it.?
The Agreement demands that governments make it unlawful to market products and devices that circumvent copyright.? This is akin to a feature in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act used by Hollywood studios to block the marketing of DVD-copying technology.? It also calls on participating nations to maintain extensive seizure and forfeiture laws with respect to counterfeited goods that are trademarked or copyrighted.? Most important, countries must carry out a legal system where victims of either physical or digital IP theft may be awarded an undefined amount of monetary damages.? In the U.S., the Copyright Act allows for damages of up to $150,000 per copyright infringement.?
Whether this Agreement will actually have any teeth is open to question.? The European Union is already whining about it, using the same tired free speech argument that was so successful in killing SOPA.
An Explosion of Laws
For almost all of its legal history, the entire body of Copyright Law consisted of the Copyright Act, most recently the Copyright Act of 1976. ?That all changed in the late 1990s with the enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, a congressional attempt to catch up to a rapidly evolving technological revolution.
But that was only the beginning.? In just the last eight years, the following new laws have been added to the copyright practitioners? ?arsenal:?
- Copyright Royalty and Distribution Reform Act of 2004 ?
- Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act of 2004 ?
- Intellectual Property Protection and Courts Amendments Act of 2004 ?
- Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 ?
- Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act of 2010PRO-IP Act
- Pending: Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prohibition Act - extension of copyright protection to fashion design
The Employers
This proliferation of new laws is finding its interpretative way into the courts.? This, combined with the six factors cited above, have induced many law firms and even a few new boutiques to launch Copyright Law practices, an unheard of phenomenon before the recent law explosion.?
?Content? companies have also begun to sit up and take notice of the copyright revolution.? Gradually, there is a movement toward hiring in-house attorneys to focus on copyright matters.? With respect to music and movies, copyright has become a major component of what falls under the label of Entertainment Law.
Colleges and universities are a third component of the new copyright practice universe.? The variety of copyright issues that arise on campus is probably the most diverse extant.
Two U.S. government agencies play a role in the Copyright Law community.? The U.S. Copyright Office? and the Copyright Royalty Board, both located in Washington, DC within the Library of Congress, employ attorneys.
The World Intellectual Property Organization hires attorneys from around the world to work in its Copyright and Related Rights Sector, which consists of five divisions that focus on Copyright Law:
- Office of the Deputy Director General
- Copyright Law Division
- Copyright E-Commerce Technology and Management Division
- Copyright Collective Management and Related Issues Division
- Enforcement and Special Projects Division
Positioning Yourself for a Copyright Job
If you did not take Copyright Law in law school, you still have a good chance of boosting your credentials for a copyright job or career.? The following educational programs can help put you in position to make a strong case for yourself:
Regardless of your practice area interests, it is always a good idea to become a member of the professional organizations in your intended field.? There are two such organizations that focus on copyright:
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Source: http://www.legalcareerweb.com/law-careers/creative-destruction-in-legal-jobs-viii-ip-law-copyrights.html
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