Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford, is a key commentator on the latest developments in copyright law in the US. He is a Director of Creative Commons, and has argued at length that copyright in its current form is suffocating creativity and innovation.
Lessig recently reported on his blog that:
“Senator [Orrin] Hatch (who used to understand stuff) has introduced the INDUCE Act, which will criminalize the act of inducing another to commit a copyright violation. This is a brand new theory of copyright liability, which, as this floor statement makes clear, is directed at overturning Sony with respect to p2p.
The proposal alone is troubling enough. But the outrageous part is that there is talk that this massive new layer of federal regulation of technology will happen without hearings — indeed, that it will be passed in the next weeks.”
The implications of this proposal are vast – a point that is not lost on the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF, as Lessig notes, responded to Hatch’s plan by imagining how the new law might be used – for example, to sue Apple for inducing copyright infringement via its iPod.
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