Another Group Joins the Call to Change the Copyright Act

If you follow this blog at all, you will know that I am not a big fan of the Copyright Act in its current form.  Well, I can happily say that I am not alone.  A group of academic authors known as the Authors Alliance are seeking changes to the Copyright Act to reflect the reality of publishing in the digital age.  In particular, this group wants the Copyright Act changed to allow librarians, archives, and heritage groups to reproduce and store books digitally.  The Authors Alliance says that in denying these groups the ability to digitize books could mean losing "long-term cultural and intellectual history."

I could not agree more.  Unfortunately, the Authors Guild vehemently disagrees.  The Authors Guild feels that making works easily available and sharable digitally will undermine the literary industry--sort of like music sharing has "undermined" the music industry. 

It appears as if the Authors Guild is doing what the music industry did when faced with the digitization of their works, trying to maintain the status quo.  I said it at the time when I was a fairly fresh-faced intellectual property attorney and the Napster case was wending its way through the court system:  the music industry then should have embraced Napster and worked with it to achieve its goals (maintaining profitability for the artists and allowing the copyright holders the ability to control their songs).  Instead, they fought tooth and nail and are now losing terribly.  The Authors Guild should learn from the music industry's mistake. 

The artists should ultimately have a say in how and what type of protections they want to have for their works. As I've written before, some authors are okay with looser restrictions, others want to maintain a vice grip on their intellectual property.  There has to be a way to modernize the Copyright Act to achieve some middle ground given that digitization is going to happen one way or another.