Week 4

As a bookend to explorations of copyright on the Net, this session will explore the compulsory licensing scheme that seeks to extract royalties from online webcasters.

We will consider the technology behind webcasting and the fears of copyright holders in coming to understand the death - or at least dearth - of a new industry amidst the complexities of copyright legislation.

Readings:

• Overview of the RIAA
• Overview of ASCAP
• Excerpts from Professor Zittrain's CARP testimony
• Statutory Licenses and the CARP: Excerpts of 17 U.S.C. 112
• Statutory Licenses and the CARP: Excerpts of 17 U.S.C. 114
• Similar statutory royalties: Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 - 17 U.S.C. 1003-4
• Exemptions from copyright: Fairness in Music Licensing Act of 1998 - 17 U.S.C. 110

Thursday Class at MIT: Software Patent and Copyright Law (Abelson)

Slides from class (PDF)

Before class, read the following:

• Read the 1991 piece from the League for Programming Freedom, "Against Software Patents".
• Skim the section from the class archive on software patents, following any of the links that look interesting.
• Read the Pennie & Edmonds Analysis of P3P and US Patent 5,862,325. You might want to briefly skim the patent itself by going to the US Patent and Trademark Office Web site and searching on the patent number. But this is a really complicated patent to read, so don't do more than skim it.
• 1989 Letter to the Tech, by Arthur Hu '80, whose company , Mosaic Software, was put out of business by Lotus's "Look and Feel" lawsuit.