Mr. Lessig's proposal for copyright reform, like the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, assumes that lawmakers should be carving up speech into political, commercial, artistic and other categories, and then offering different legal protection according to how society values the output.
Might this sort of thinking be feeding into the Commission's proposals on copyright, too?
The copyright proposal has raised complicated issues: Can a dress design ever really be original?
Caroline Lucas, the Green candidate in Brighton, argues that the proposal is that copyright would expire 14 years after the death of the creator, not 14 years after creation.
Among these, the one which has caused the biggest stir is the Greens' proposal to change copyright terms (made on p61, in its "Information and Digital Rights" section).
Among the measures highlighted by the O.E.C.D. study is a German proposal to strengthen copyright protection for newspaper stories on the Internet.
The copyright proposal in Germany has drawn opposition from a wide range of groups, including lobbyists for nonpublishing businesses, who see it adding costs, because they might have to pay more for online information.
Another highly controversial portion of the copyright proposal is a requirement on websites that host large amounts of user-generated content to monitor user behavior to identify and prevent copyright infringement.
The other one is the proposal to extend copyright for press publishers and allow them to ask for licence fees for the reproduction of even the smallest snippets of content — so, for example, the headline of a news article.
Last month the EU parliament's legal affairs committee approved the final text of the copyright proposal — including approving its two most controversial articles — kicking off a last-ditch effort by groups opposed to what they dub the 'link tax' and 'censorship machines' to marshal MEPs to reopen debate and be able to amend the proposal.
