Name: Maricris Alegre

Section: 3Y1-2
Topic: Copyright Reform and Educational Progress
Author: Nicholas Bremble

In 1995, the Department of Commerce under President Clinton released a 267-page document arguing that
strengthened intellectual property enforcement was necessary to ensure the population of the "national
information infrastructure" with education, information, and entertainment products. Contrary to the
predictions and recommendations of that paper, a very different set of laws emerged over the next decade
and became dominant forces in the development of the U.S. information infrastructure. These provisions-
section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and
the continued potency of Sony v. Universal-generated a far more decentralized version of Clinton's global
information society, one dominated not by commercial partnerships between network providers and content
owners but instead by independent information intermediaries at the edges of the network. Other scholars
have explored these safe harbors separately, but this Article fills a gap in the literature by looking at the
collective, systematic impact of these laws upon the growth of the Internet. In so doing, this Article places
§512 and §230 in the context of historical governmental attempts to shape the production and distribution
of information. Many scholars and advocates have resisted this move, arguing instead that these laws,
along with judicial decisions such as Sony v. Universal, amount to the deregulation of the Internet and the
creation of a lawless zone. But when these laws are considered together, a different picture begins to
emerge: one where the government encourages the development of a "layer" of intermediaries situated
between network providers (such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon) and content providers (such as Disney,
The New York Times, and Viacom), and sets in place a legal framework that enables intermediaries to
counteract the power of these network and content providers. Safe harbors, then, serve an important and
unexamined regulatory function-a regulatory function that the government likely would have been unable to
implement on its own (without the cooperation of intermediaries) due to jurisdictional, constitutional,
technological, and political limitations on the government's power over Internet providers.

REVIEW:
In the end, the question is not one of markets but of politics. If we— collectively, the people of the rich
countries—value our cultures and if our political institutions are functional enough to instantiate that value
into real support, we will find ways to pay for our core educational institutions, including traditional
universities that take the production of knowledge, not just its dissemination, as their mission. In that event,
nonprofit, tuition-free, online universities such as UoPeople could be an extraordinary monument to the
power of entrepreneurial vision and volunteerism. But UoPeople depends on the wealth of knowledge and
skill those core institutions create; it cannot replace them. We could accept that information is not going to
be produced adequately by the market—and is essential for markets to function successfully. Thus, we
could simply agree that we need government-financed universities as badly as we need government-
financed prisons, wars, and highways. It is simply unfair to our youngsters to require them to pay for the
production of the knowledge we all need. Perhaps we will try radically shortened patent and copyright
terms, allowing information to flow more freely and avoiding the side effects of governmentally created
monopolies, much as we did for physical infrastructure in the early nineteenth century (see the Charles
River Bridge controversy).5 We could instead finance discovery and innovation more efficiently and cheaply
with a prize system, financed by taxes and administered by the NIH/NSF or delegated in part to relevant
university and industry research departments. Perhaps the process of finding new ways to pay for the
creation of knowledge and skill would be eased if we changed governmental accounting norms to reflect
that these expenses are investments, so that much of current year “deficits” ought instead to be recorded
as “saving for the future