Re: [dvd-discuss] Posner's views on copyright

[Wendy Seltzer <wendy(at)seltzer.com>]

Veering far off-topic here, there was a very funny review of Posner's 
"Public Intellectuals" in Sunday's New York Times Book Review.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/books/review/13BROOKST.html>

At least copyright terms have a plausible connection to economic theory, 
though I have a nagging suspicion that Posner will undervalue the public 
domain and view most of fair use as "inefficient."   Can we even quantify 
the benefit the public gets from a rich public domain and generous rights 
to make transformative use of copyrighted works?

At 02:27 PM 1/14/02 -0500, jerwin@gmu.edu wrote:
>I was reading slate, and came across this week's "Diary" column,
>written by none other than Richard Posner.
>
>http://slate.msn.com//?id=2060621&entry=2060676&device=
>
>" And working on two articles that I
>                 am writing with an economist, one on presidential
>                 pardons (yes, there is a demand for and a supply of
>                 such things that economics can illuminate) and
>                 another on copyright law, focusing on an issue of
>                 considerable theoretical interest: Should copyrights
>                 be perpetual, rather than limited to the lifetime of the
>                 author plus 70 years?
>"
>
>Hmm.

--
Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@seltzer.com
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html