Q: What are your thoughts on the First Sale Doctrine and the general idea of portability with regard to e-books and other digital media? I am looking forward to the day when my ownership rights are not artificially restricted by the technological limits of the device on which I choose to read/view/listen to them.
– Andy O.
A: The First Sale Doctrine represents an important principle forgotten by copyright extremists — that copyright “protection has never,” as Justice Stevens put it in the Sony Betamax case, “accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his work.” But in my view, to restrike a proper balance in the digital age, we need to move away from an architecture of copyright law that triggers regulation upon the copy. Instead, copyright law needs to focus on the economically relevant acts that need to be regulated to create the incentives copyright law should produce — and not on the (impossible, self-defeating, and absurd) objective of regulating every time a computer “copies” a work.
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