NICHOLAS BENTLEY

When I look at the premise of copyright law, that creative work has to be fixed in a tangible form before copyright can be granted and then it is the physical copies that are regulated, I see a fundamental weakness. This premise overshadows the fact that the result of this creative work, the creative product, continues to inhabit the mind in intangible form even after its initial birth in the tangible world and it is this intangible creation which is valuable not solely its physical manifestation. I will argue that when the tangible vehicle for distributing this intangible product was a physical object, such as a book, this weakness was not apparent, while today, when the vehicle is often packets of digital information (that appear to have some intangible qualities themselves), this weakness, I allude to, becomes significant... Proposed system for protecting intellectual property and copyright in digital environments