Is copyright law outdated? Why should I care about it?
Text Transcript
Travis Stegemoller, Trademark Attorney: I think the overall scheme of copyright law is not outdated. In certain instances, it may be, like in applications to say, software, where software iteration occurs so rapidly that filing multiple copyrights over and over and over on the same piece of code, or at least the same piece of source code, doesn’t make a lot of sense from a business standpoint.
Also, copyrights as it relates to licensing and the Internet, right, the proliferation of digital content sort of makes it difficult to track and police your own content when you put it out into the world. So we’ve found it to be a lot easier using for example the Creative Commons where you can apply a free use license on your content so that the burden on the user’s end is less and the burden on your end in policing your content is also less.
But overall the structure and the scheme of copyright law still makes sense in today’s business landscape.