A Map of the Frontiers of Copyright

The daunting task of commenting in just a few pages on three very rich articles leads the author to give a high-level overview of the Symposium's copyright contributions. He takes the motivation for his comments from the Symposium title, Frontiers of Intellectual Property. One way to understand this title in the context of the copyright panel is that it describes a panel that explores copyright law's "frontier". The three articles suggest some of the important questions that copyright law will likely face in the near future, and if one were to draw a map of the outer reaches of current copyright law based on these articles, it would show at least four frontiers that will call for further exploration by copyright scholars, lawyers, and policy makers in coming years: the impact of new technologies for creating and using works of authorship, the interests of audiences for copyrighted works, the regulation of copyright intermediaries, and the demarcation of the boundaries of copyright protection.