...This vessel, that is, the combined canon of copyright and patent law, was built to transport forms and methods of expression that are essentially different from the ephemeral cargo with which it is now loaded. It flows from both inside and outside. Legal efforts to keep an old ship afloat manifest themselves in three ways: as a frantic rearrangement of chairs on deck; as stern warnings to passengers that if the ship goes down, they will face severe criminal penalties; and as an imperturbable denial of what is happening. Intellectual property law can no more be patched up, narrowed or expanded to contain the gases of digitized expression than land property law can be revised to cover the allocation of radio frequencies. (Which is actually quite reminiscent of the attempts made in this article)....

Edited by Evgeny Gorny and Andrey Madison.