Introduction

• Author: Cameron Hutchison
• Pages: 1-12

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Introduction

A. THE INTERESTS THAT COPYRIGHT LAW IS TO ADVANCE

Copyright law is best understood as a policy tool whose overarching

purpose is to promote the generation of knowledge and culture in soci-

ety. It is generally accepted that copyright law does this by advancing

certain interests. ese are () authorial incentive (to ensure an adequate

level of monopoly rights protection for authors so that they have incen-

tive to create “works,” such as music, books, and computer programs,

through commercial exploitation), () user rights (to ensure that down-

stream authors and users of such works can benef‌it from using those

works in new or productive ways during the term of the monopoly),

and () dissemination (to promote the widest possible dissemination to

the public of these works and their uses). In so doing (and possibly as

a fourth interest to consider), copyright law should not unduly burden

technological uses and innovation.

e concurrent advancement of these interests is often not pos-

sible, and conf‌licts between them must then be reconciled, ideally so

as to further copyright’s overarching purpose. e persistent tension

1 Patricia Aufderheide & Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in

Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) at 16: “Copyright policy is the

collection of ways that a government provides incentives to create culture. And we

mean culture broadly—building, aggregating, and sharing knowledge. Progress is

grounded, as policymakers know, in the growth of culture.”