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48 Hous. L. Rev. 691 (2011-2012)
Copyright on a Clean Slate

handle is hein.journals/hulr48 and id is 703 raw text is: EIGHTH ANNUAL BAKER BOTTS LECTURE COPYRIGHT ON A CLEAN SLATE Paul Goldstein* New technologies regularly disrupt copyright law in the United States and around the world, challenging the law to adjust to new market contours. Recorded music (initially the pianola roll) triggered one such legal change in 1909; radio, television, cable, and satellite dominated copyright in the 1920s through the 1970s; private copying in the '60s through the '80s; computers, the '80s and '90s; and, for well more than a decade now, the Internet has tested copyright markets and copyright law. It is copyright law's encounter with the Internet that compels the thorough housecleaning that I propose today. One reason to start on a clean slate is the Internet's unprecedented capacity to reduce transaction costs and to organize fluent markets for information and entertainment that previously were impracticable; this, the Internet's bright side, will make it possible to erase from the present Copyright Act a century's worth of cumbersome, second-best regulatory solutions to what are essentially market-transaction problems. But the Internet has a dark side, too, embodied in its widely realized capacity for unlicensed, but always perfect, copies and streams of copyrighted works. For this, a new kind of copyright law is also needed-one that is leaner, more accessible, and more appealing to consumers-if these unencumbered uses are to be brought under copyright control. So our clean slate will address the dark side, too. * Lillick Professor of Law, Stanford University. 691

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