At Fairly Useful, Matthew Sag and Mark Schultz at DePaul have posted a lengthy response to John Tehranian’s new essay about the ubiquity of copyright infringement embedded in daily activities, “Infringement Nation.” They write:
The real problem with copyright law today is not so much the tyranny of the law as eventually applied, but rather the tyranny of uncertainty as to how the law will be applied. This uncertainty is the product of factors including, the opaque structure of the Copyright Act, the complicated and fact specific nature of the fair use doctrine and defenses such as implied licensing. It is easy and rhetorically expedient to construct a dystopian scenario of copyright gone wild, but this kind of exaggeration does little to address public confusion about the law and only emboldens copyright maximalists by lending credence to their most grandiose claims.