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For example, imagine you were part of a Star Trek fan club. You
gathered every month to share trivia, and maybe to enact a kind of fan
fiction about the show. One person would play Spock, another, Captain
Kirk. The characters would begin with a plot from a real story,
then simply continue it. 24
Before the Internet, this was, in effect, a totally unregulated activity.
No matter what happened inside your club room, you would never
be interfered with by the copyright police. You were free in that space
to do as you wished with this part of our culture. You were allowed to
build on it as you wished without fear of legal control.
But if you moved your club onto the Internet, and made it generally
available for others to join, the story would be very different. Bots scouring
the Net for trademark and copyright infringement would quickly
find your site. Your posting of fan fiction, depending upon the ownership
of the series that you’re depicting, could well inspire a lawyer’s
threat. And ignoring the lawyer’s threat would be extremely costly indeed.
The law of copyright is extremely efficient. The penalties are severe,
and the process is quick.
This change in the effective force of the law is caused by a change
in the ease with which the law can be enforced. That change too shifts
the law’s balance radically. It is as if your car transmitted the speed at
which you traveled at every moment that you drove; that would be just
one step before the state started issuing tickets based upon the data you
transmitted. That is, in effect, what is happening here.
Market: Concentration
So copyright’s duration has increased dramatically—tripled in the past
thirty years. And copyright’s scope has increased as well—from regulating
only publishers to now regulating just about everyone. And
copyright’s reach has changed, as every action becomes a copy and
hence presumptively regulated. And as technologists find better ways
“PROPERTY” 161