Copyright Protection in Digital Environment: Emerging Issues (original) (raw)

The copyright law in historical annals is known to be the legacy of technology. It has undergone systematic changes keeping in view the nature, extent and domain of technology involved to secure the public interest of creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Its main thrust is to provide adequate incentives to authors and creators of diverse copyright works, on the one hand, and make such works accessible to the public on the other hand. The copyright law had to adjust itself between the need to award the creator and the desirability of making such works public. With the ubiquity of the Internet as a unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication all over the world, shrunk into a digital global village, the protection of copyright works has become a serious concern for lawyers, as well as, the other stakeholders. The Internet together with P2P computer networks makes it possible for an increasingly larger number of individuals to participate in collaborative information production, thereby enervate the efforts to provide incentives to original creators of intellectual property. The Internet enables the nearly-instantaneous, original quality reproduction of and world-wide, lightening-speed dissemination of copyrighted works. The above arresting features of Internet make itself emerge as "the world's biggest copy machine" The puzzles and paradoxes underlying the digital dilemma, by nature, are connected with the dichotomy between the notion of "information wants to be free" and the demands for stronger proprietary control of information in the digital environment. Against the above background this paper shall examine and critically analyze emerging issues regarding copyright protection in digital environment.