This week, I read Russell first even though it was listed second on the syllabus because I wanted to get an overview of copyright from a relatively neutral source before reading Litman's arguments. Overall, I really enjoyed Russell's text because she incorporates interesting case studies and works hard to break up the unavoidably dense and sometimes confusing parts of copyright law with question/answer and tip sections. Plus, I haven't had a textbook that included pictures just for fun since about 5th grade.
Anyway, one of the things I learned from Complete Copyright is that a particular urban legend I've heard is completely false. As an undergraduate, I would sometimes hear from members of fraternities and sororities a story something like this: "All Greek organizations' rituals are in the Library of Congress but ours is not because [such and such president/supreme court justice/famous political member of speaker's organization] took ours out." Having a written copy of their ritual in the Library of Congress is somewhat upsetting to members of Greek organizations because ritual is supposed to secret. However, from chapter one, I now know that the only reason a document would end up in the Library of Congress is because someone wanted to register it for copyright. The only reason to do this is to file a copyright infringement suit or allow someone to contact the author for permission to use the work. Since rituals are supposed to be secret, neither of these actions are desirable and there is no reason to register for copyright.
Moving on to Litman, I quickly realized that she has some strong opinions about copyright, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In evaluating her arguments, I wondered some very basic questions - who is Jessica Litman? Is she an expert in the field and, therefore, qualified to make these arguments? Finding no answers to these questions at the front or back of the book, I discovered her biography on the University of Michigan Law School website (http://web.law.umich.edu/_FacultyBioPage/facultybiopagenew.asp?ID=346). In part this states:
Before rejoining the Michigan faculty in 2006, Professor Litman was professor of law at Wayne State University in Detroit, a visiting professor at NYU Law School and at American University Washington College of Law, as well as a professor at the University of Michigan Law School from 1984-90. In addition, she has taught copyright law at the University of Tokyo as part of the Law Faculty Exchange Program. Professor Litman is a past trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA and a past chair of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property. In addition to serving on the advisory board for the Public Knowledge organization, she is a member of the Intellectual Property and Internet Committee of the ACLU, the Advisory Council of the Future of Music Coalition, the advisory board of Cyberspace Law Abstracts, and the American Law Institute.
Clearly, from all these experiences, she is an expert on copyright and well qualified to form opinions. With a new respect for the author, I returned to the text. One of the main themes I noticed is that Litman is very critical of copyright lawyers who make their income from clients (as opposed to her position as a professor). She makes this obvious at the beginning of chapter two by stating "copyright lawyers are a peculiarly myopic breed of human being." Furthermore, she argues that copyright laws are purposely written to be confusing so that clients will have to pay lawyers to translate them. The alternative is to disregard the laws and end up in court at which point a copyright lawyer will still need to be hired. For example, proprietors of small businesses unaware of the fact that they need to buy a license to play music in their business "went to court to protect their supposed right to play music - every year - at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars." This is quite ridiculous and, so far, I agree with Litman in that copyright laws need to be completely rewritten to be more readable although my opinion may change with reading the second half of Digital Copyright next week.
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