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The Commentary section contains papers directed at current policy issues. The contributions, which will be written primarily but not entirely by PFF staffers, will analyze issues and provide information and links to useful material.
The papers will be directed primarily at a policy audience. Because many of the battles are fought out in legislatures and courts (as DeToqueville noted almost two centuries ago, in American everything ultimately becomes a legal issue), some emphasis on law is unavoidable, but the focus will be on policy implications.
We hope to make the pieces of particular use to journalists who must interpret issues of intellectual property to a larger audience,
and to congressional staff, who must deal with these issues through appropriate action or, often, even more appropriate inaction.
The approach will vary with the issue at hand. Some pieces will be moderately long, though 5,000 words will be the top, and some only op-ed length. Some will be extensively footnoted; some not.
We are not setting up machinery to append comments, but we will be happy to add corrections or disagreements, especially when these are buttressed by fact and logic. Email us at letters@ipcentral.info. For an example of useful back and forth, see the article "Today Linux, Tomorrow the World?" that appeared in TechCentralStation on January 22, 2004, and the subsequent discussion. We reserve the right to add our response, as well.
The first two pieces in this Commentary series consist of:
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Copy Left: The Opposite Of Copyright, by William F. Adkinson, Jr. (Feb. 4, 2004).
This is a quick reaction to an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine on Jan. 25, 2004, entitled "The Tyranny of Copyright."
Future efforts will cover:
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The battle over the definition of contributory infringement - the Sony case, as applied to the recent lawsuits against Napster, Grokster, and Aimster;
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