Can Copyright Law Respond to the New Technology
![handle is hein.journals/llj61 and id is 397 raw text is: Can Copyright Law Respond to the New Technology?
CHAIRMAN: JULIUS J. MA=EE, Law Librarian, New York University
JoHN SCHULmAN, Attorney, New York City
BENJAmIN KAPLAN, Professor, Harvard Law School
VEPNER C. APP, Director Emeritus, Council of Library Resources
ABE A. GOLDmAN, General Counsel, Copyright Office
GEORGE FRosT, Patent Section Director, General Motors Corporation
[The third session of the 61st Annual Meeting
of the American Association of Law Libraries
convened at 2:45 p.m. in the Franklin Suite of
the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, with Professor Julius J. Marke,
Law Librarian of New York University, presid-
ing.]
CHAunfAN MARxE: Ladies and gentlemen, our
panel is entitled, How, if at all, Can Copy-
right Law Respond to the New Technology?
In essence, it reflects the problem suggested by
the Register of Copyrights, Abraham L. Kamin-
stein, when he wrote:
Just as the first copyright laws were a re-
sponse to an earlier revolution brought on
by the development of the printing press,
so must a copyright statute today respond
to the challenge of a technology based on
instant communication and reproduction of
an author's works throughout the world.
The title also reflects the problem so aptly
noted by Marshall McLuhan when he stated
with his characteristic insight: In the age of
Xerox, the reader becomes a publisher and so
does the schoolroom.
Now, we are not too distant from the time
when the integrity of a basic collection of ma-
terial, miniaturized or compacted and stored
in electronic information center computers or
something similar, will be preserved by xero-
graphic printers, providing facsimile reproduc-
tion by remote transmission in hardcopy form,
or by video scanning of ephemeral copy on a
closed circuit TV monitor elsewhere.
The collection will remain intact because the
computer, in essence, will assume the role of a
duplicating rather than a circulating library.
As one copy of a book fed into such a system
will be able to service all simultaneous demands
for it, access to the library collection by any
number of readers at one time will be guar-
anteed. This service alone will revolutionize the
concept of library organization which at present,
as you know, provides access by lending the
original document.
When we also consider that eventually these
library systems will be linked into integrated,
compatible computer storage networks of re-
gional, national, and even international net-
works of computer storage which will have, as
Professor Kaplan, one of our panelists, has
vividly described in his An Unhurried View of
Copyright:1
The systems will have a prodigious capacity
for manipulating the store in useful ways,
for selecting portions of it upon call and
transmitting them to any distance, where
they will be converted as desired to forms
directly or indirectly cognizable, whether
as printed pages, phonorecords, tapes,
transient displays of sights or sounds, or
hieroglyphs for further machine uses.
The question inevitably arises, How will we
protect the creator and owner of intellectual
property and still preserve the public's right of
access to information and knowledge by means
of this new technology?
Consider, too, that audio-visual dial access
teaching machines, operated by remote control,
which will provide hundreds and even thou-
sands of students with simultaneous audio and
visual access to a journal article or excerpts
from a book, will affect the owner and con-
sumer of intellectual property, as well as the
communication medium itself.
Since 1955, exhaustive studies on revising the
present 1909 Copyright Law have been made
by the Copyright Office and various interested
groups. Still the current or potential impact of
computers and other information storage and
retrieval systems on copyright law was not fore-
seen; and, as a result, the general copyright re-
vision bill submitted to the 90th Congress (S-
1 Kaplan, Benjamin. An Unhurried View of
Copyright. New York: Columbia University Press,
1967. Pp. 142. (Columbia University School of Law.
James S. Carpentier Lectures, 1966). $5.00.
PANELISTS:](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/llj61&div=63&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Can Copyright Law Respond to the New Technology
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