Law Commons^™

Panel Ii: Public Appropriation Of Private Rights: Pursuing Internet Copyright Violators, Rebecca Tushnet, Michael Carlinsky, Justin Hughes, Sonia Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It seems to me that the story of music on the Internet over the past five or six years is the story of two fantasies colliding. The first fantasy is that information wants to be free, that with the Internet we can throwaway all the bottles and just have the wine and the free flow of data, which apparently was generated from somewhere and then circulated forever. So, there was that fantasy, that we would not need copyright anymore because everything would be available to everyone. The other fantasy is the record companies' fantasy of perfect control, that there would …