Next month I’ll be speaking about my work on copyright law at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich. The title of the presentation reads “Access-Right and Copyright”.
I will introduce the underlying inquiry and frame the issues as descriptive and prescriptive questions concerning proprietary access control under copyright. Three fundamental concepts stand at the basis of such questions, namely, access, property and information. These concepts will receive some elaboration in the context of access-to-information problems.
I will continue to speak about the concept of the “access-right” and offer a formal definition. Next, I will attempt to identify aspects of the access-right is “traditional” copyright law and compare it to new manifestation of the access-right in current “digital” copyright law. I will address overprotection concerns related to the formal (de jure) and actual (de facto) expansion of the exclusive rights and briefly touch upon three categories of solutions and approached: copyright neo-conservatism, copyright reformism and finally, an access-right approach to the problems of copyright law and policy in the digital age. Presentation slides attached. Comments welcome.
UPDATE: Due to technical problems uploading the presentation to the site, here is an external link hosting the PDF file.