Digital Access: Copyright Law and the Birth of the Online World

FAIN: FT-278538-21

Gerardo Con Diaz
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Davis, CA 95618-6153)

Archival research and writing a book on the history of internet copyright law.

I will finish Digital Access, a book that recounts the human stories behind the rise and current state of Internet copyright (under contract, Yale Press). This is public-facing scholarship grounded entirely on original interdisciplinary research. It will show that the future of a media-rich, free-flowing Internet depends on understanding how the technological and commercial systems that sustain the online world have developed jointly with, and are inseparable from, the past and present of U.S. copyright law. The book argues that the struggle to regulate the flow of creative works online has 1) eroded the cultural and political boundaries that distinguish copyright enforcement from censorship, 2) transformed legal and legislative proceedings into battlegrounds for competing conceptions of the Internet and its future, and 3) infused global Internet governance with unsolved legal puzzles over the meaning of creativity and media reproduction that date as far back as the 1960s.