Law In The Information Age Lecture: Peter Menell -- A Decade After The Digital Copyright Revolution: Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead

The release of Napster’s peer-to-peer software in 1999 triggered the digital copyright revolution. Within a matter of months, a large swath of the record industry’s prime demographic found the celestial jukebox of their dreams and exited the record marketplace. Although Napster’s service was shut down just a few years later, the emergence of other file sharing platforms and the roll-out of authorized digital distribution technologies have dramatically reshaped the content and technology industries over the past decade. In this lecture, Professor Menelll re-visits prognostications from the outset of that turbulent period, examines the lessons learned from the past decade, and explores the challenges for adapting the copyright system to the Internet age. Peter S. Mennell is the Herman Phleger Visiting Professor of Law (2011-12) at Stanford Law School and the Robert L. Bridges Professor of Law and Director at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, University of California at Berkeley School of Law.