Informatică economică (Jan 2007)
Copyright, an Incentive or a Burden?
Abstract
A copyright provides protection for original artistic or literary work and is valid for the life of the owner plus 70 years. There is a growing tension between creative practices that require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content. Very recently this has played out in the law suit between the media corporation Viacom and the Internet portal YouTube, which is owned by Google. This is against the background of a steadily emerging open source and creative commons culture. Milestones in the open source movement are the OpenOffice office suite, Netscape's publication of the source code for its product as open software, Google's library project, various free archives for scientific dissemination, such as Cornell University's ArXiv.
