'An Hundred Stories in Ten Days': COVID-19 Lessons for Culture, Learning, and Copyright Law

Abstract

In the face of a pandemic, copyright law may seem a frivolous concern; but its importance lies in the ever-expanding role that it plays in either enabling or constraining the kinds of communicative activities that are critical to a flourishing life. In this article, we reflect on how the cultural and educative practices that have burgeoned under quarantine conditions shed new light on a longstanding problem: the need to recalibrate the copyright system to better serve its purposes in the face of changing social and technological circumstances. We begin by discussing how copyright restrictions have manifested in a variety of contexts driven by the coronavirus lockdown, focusing first on creative engagement and then on learning, foregrounding the damage done by encoding a permission-first approach into governance structures and digital platforms. These stories unsettle the common copyright narrative—the one that tells us that copyright encourages learning and the creation and dissemination of works—laying bare its disconnect from the current realities of our digital dependency. Turning to consider the justifications for copyright control, we underscore the critical role of user rights and substantive technological neutrality in crafting a flexible and fair copyright system for the future. The article concludes with some lessons that might be drawn from these tales of copyright in the time of COVID-19 to inform the development of new digital copyright norms for whatever “new normal” emerges.

Keywords: Copyright, COVID-19 lockdown, law and technology, social media, online education, libraries, user generated content, fair dealing, user rights, technological neutrality, copyright licensing, automated enforcement, notice and take down, free expression

JEL Classification: O30, O33, O34, O35, O38, I00, I23, I24, Z11, Z18