Currency

From The Importance of, and originating at Copyfight, Ernie Miller has an interesting post linking to Julie Hilden’s recent column on copyright-and-the-future. Ernie is down on Julie Hilden for focusing on last century’s theme — copying — and overlooking the meme of the new century — information distribution and circulation. I’m not persuaded that copyright-in-information-as-current-that-flows is superior to copyright-in-work-that-gets-reproduced as an organizing theme. “Information” becomes the analytic fiction of the 21st century, just as “the work” was the analytic fiction of the 2oth century. We still have to look inside the thing — dynamic or static as it may be — and work out what we’re trying to do, or say, via the law.