The “Break it Down” Blog

Bruce Schneier linked to a paper written by John Tehranian titled: “Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap“. The most interesting part of the paper is more or less captured on Bruce’s blog where John takes copyright law and applies it literally to a very normal scenario for some John Doe author that ends up with roughly $4.5 billion dollars of penalties a year… when copyright law is applied literally to the T.

Here’s the quote:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer — a veritable grand larcenist — or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.