frontiers of intellectual property

["Perelman, Michael" <MPerelman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Porges, Seth. 2004. "We The People...Can't Make Copies?" Business Week
(12 July): p. 12.
"How much is the U.S. Constitution worth to you?  On Amazon.com, the
going rate is $2.99.  A copy of the founding document, long in the
public domain, can be acquired easily and legally for free on the
Internet or at any public library.  But e-book publisher NuVision
Publications has begun selling it online as an e-book in an encrypted
format that can be printed only twice per year."
"Oddly enough, people seem to be buying the Constitution. The e-book's
Amazon sales ranking, as of June 29, was a respectable 1,016 out of the
hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells on its Web site.  That's
despite the fact that helping someone print the e-book more than twice
could violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that
forbids tampering with anti-piracy protections, according to Wendy
Seltzer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929