Copyright's Excess: Symposium Foreword

The focal point of this symposium is COPYRIGHT’S EXCESS, Glynn Lunney’s thoughtful and trenchant critique of copyright law’s effects on the U.S. recording industry. Before delving into the book’s contribution and into the chorus of scholarly replies that it has inspired, it first bears mention that both the book and its author share a cardinal strength: practicality. As Professor Lunney’s colleague at Texas A&M, I have heard him remark more than once that each of his three fields of formal study—engineering, then law, and eventually economics—is ultimately concerned with solving problems. Problem solving is also the basic template of COPYRIGHT’S EXCESS.

If a principal aim of copyright law in the United States is to encourage the creation of new works, and if the scope and duration of our copyright protection have systematically grown since the Founding, then here immediately we have specified our problem and described our long-accepted solution. But has it really been a solution?