Chicago-Kent College of Law Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law All Faculty Scholarship Faculty Scholarship January 2009 Freedom of the Press 2.0 Edward Lee IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/fac_schol Part of the First Amendment Commons Recommended Citation Edward Lee, Freedom of the Press 2.0, (2009). Available at: https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/fac_schol/353 This Contribution to Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons @ IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. Freedom of the Press 2.0 Abstract In today’s digital age, copyright law is changing. It now attempts to regulate machines. Over the past twenty years, and particularly with the advent of the Internet, copyright holders have increasingly invoked copyright law to regulate directly—indeed, even to prohibit—the manufacture and sale of technology that facilitates the mass dissemination of expressive works. Although the concerns of copyright holders about the ease of digital copying are understandable, the expansion of copyright law to regulate—and, in some cases, to prohibit—technologies raises a troubling question. Can the government regulate under copyright law technologies that facilitate the dissemination of speech, consistent with the First Amendment? If so, are there any limits to what the government can do? Or does copyright law have constitutional carte blanche to regulate technologies, without any First Amendment scrutiny? Because copyright law, dating back to the first Copyright Act of 1790, traditionally refrained from regulating technologies directly, these questions were scarcely considered before.