Pirates of the Digital Millennium: How the Intellectual Property Wars Damage Our Personal Freedoms, Our Jobs, and the World Economy

Front Cover
Prentice Hall/Financial Times, 2005 - Business & Economics - 294 pages
As we move into the digital age nothing is more important than understanding the issues about digital piracy and what to do about them. The place to start gaining that understanding is with Pirates of the Digital Millennium.- Lester Thurow, Professor, MIT, former columnist for Newsweek, and author of The Zero Sum Society. The pirates in this book include both teenagers working in their bedrooms and corporate executives in their offices, hijacking the gift of digital technology. This is a well-researched and engaging work on a subject of great importance now and for the future.- Tracy Kidder, author of the international best seller, The Soul of the New Machine. Gantz and Rochester do a masterful job of analysing the impact piracy is having at the intersection of business, technology, and society. The moral! What doesn't kill us will make us stronger. - Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, and Living on the Fault Line. This book takes you inside the global wars over digital piracy, intellectual property, and copyright. It is for everyone with a stake in these issues: consumers to artists, business people to policymakers. never downloaded an MP3. And it's just begun. It's a war between media conglomerates and teenagers. It is a battle to the death between billion-dollar tech companies and billion-dollar content providers. It's artists battling artists, nations battling nations. The media universe is shaking to its very foundations. One book helps you make sense of what's happened and what's next: Pirates of the Digital Millennium. The war over digital piracy and intellectual property is being fought everywhere on earth. It's the world's No.1 technology story. It just might be today's No.1 culture and entertainment story, too. Now, best-selling authors John Gantz and Jack Rochester take on the subject from every side: culture, ethics, law, business, even geopolitics. They start with facts, not uninformed opinion: facts drawn from IDC's unprecedented 57-country survey of digital piracy and its impact, as well as fresh focus group and survey research conducted specifically for this book. You'll travel from the streets of Bangkok to the halls of Congress, secret duplicating factories in Paraguay to America's suburban bedrooms. of digital copying. You'll hear every side of the debate. You'll also hear something unprecedented in debates about piracy: some real, fair solutions. Will big media survive? Can you sue your customers into submission? The cultural impact of strict copyright law - Does strict copyright law protect creativity-or shackle it? Are we killing our No.1 export market? If we can't export creative content, what can we export? It covers: DMCA - the secret history; making political sausage - how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it through Congress, Eliot Ness or the Keystone Kops; law enforcement versus piracy - shovelling against the tide; and, through the fog - the future of intellectual property. Sensible grand compromises that just might work.

From inside the book

Contents

ARE YOU A DIGITAL PIRATE?
3
IS IT COPYRIGHT OR THE RIGHT TO COPY?
27
WHERE ARE WE TODAY?
52
Copyright

7 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information