Why Copyright Is Breaking the Internet

The internet was built on copying. This is not a metaphor. When you load a webpage, your browser downloads a copy of the HTML, the images, the scripts. When a search engine indexes the web, it makes copies of everything it crawls. When you send an email with an image, that image is copied to the sender's server, the recipient's server, and probably several backup servers along the way.

Copyright law was not designed for this. It was designed for a world of physical objects, where making a copy required significant physical effort — a printing press, a photocopier — and where copies were therefore scarce and valuable. The legal frameworks we have imported into the digital world were built for a different reality, and they are producing outcomes that range from absurd to actively harmful.

Consider the DMCA takedown system, the mechanism by which copyright owners can demand that platforms remove infringing content. In theory, this is a balanced system: copyright holders get a tool to protect their work, platforms get a safe harbor from liability, and disputed claims are resolved by a counter-notification process.

In practice, the system is weaponized at scale. Large rights holders use automated systems to send millions of takedowns, many of which are erroneous. A musician covering her own song can receive a takedown from an algorithm that matches her recording against the original she wrote. A documentary filmmaker can lose years of footage to a music licensing dispute over eight seconds of background television. Political opponents are using spurious copyright claims to silence criticism. The counter-notification process requires legal knowledge and courage that most individuals do not have.

The underlying problem is that copyright terms have expanded far beyond any plausible connection to creative incentive. In the United States, copyright now lasts for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. Most of the works currently under copyright were created by people who are dead, by companies that have been acquired and re-acquired, and their cultural usefulness is being actively suppressed in the name of revenue extraction.

Walt Disney died in 1966. His early work — Mickey Mouse, the original animated films — will not enter the public domain in the US until the 2030s, primarily because Disney has successfully lobbied for copyright extensions every time the expiration approached. This is not a copyright system serving creative incentive. It is a rent-extraction mechanism.

The alternative is not no copyright. Creative work requires some protection if creators are to have economic incentives to create. But the current system has been so thoroughly captured by large rights holders that it bears almost no relationship to its stated purpose.

A saner system would have shorter terms — thirty years is the figure that most economists studying creative industries settle on as producing the right incentives without the deadweight losses. It would have fair use provisions robust enough to protect criticism, commentary, and creative reuse without requiring years of litigation to establish. It would have a registration requirement that forces rights holders to actively maintain their claims rather than passively extending them.

None of this will happen in the near term, because the lobbying infrastructure of the entertainment industry is excellent. But the cost is real: a more impoverished public domain, a less useful internet, and a creative culture that increasingly can only afford to reference the past by licensing it.