Fisher, William W., III. Promises to keep: technology, law, and the future of entertainment. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8047-5013-0.

Summary: Technology is transforming the ways in which popular music, television, and film are produced and distributed, making it possible for artists and performers to create more interesting and diverse works more easily, with less cost, and to reach audiences with more diverse tastes. The media corporations that own the current production and distribution systems, however, are trying to use copyright laws and legal restraints on technological innovation, in order to increase their profits and their control over popular culture. This policy is short-sighted and will ultimately work against the interests of consumers, artists, and the corporations themselves.

The author explores the economic and practical implications of several alternative ways of managing cultural production and distribution. He concludes that the greatest benefit to society would result from a system in which the creator of a work would register it a centralized, government-administered office, which would estimate (by counting downloads and sampling indirect data) how often the work was copied or performed and pay the creator a proportionate royalty, funded by taxes. At the same time, copyright law would be changed to allow registered works to be distributed, reproduced, adapted, and performed freely.

Eight times in the past thirteen years, an innovation -- capitalizing in some way upon the new digital storage and playback technologies and the communicative power of the Internet -- has offered consumers better or more convenient access to recorded entertainment. In each instance, the people that stood to lose from widespread deployment of that innovation fought back -- through litigation, through law reform, or with technological countermeasures. Not all of these cycles have run their course. But so far, in each case the resisters have in the end prevailed.

[The eight instances to which Fisher refers are: digital audiotape recorders; DVDs; music lockers (e.g., I-drive, RioPort, MyPlay); Webcasting; centralized file sharing (e.g., Napster, Scour, Aimster); distributed file sharing (e.g., Gnutella, KaZaA); CD burning; and full-featured personal video recorders (TiVo, ReplayTV). Fisher describes the laws and court decisions relating to these technologies in some detail. His general conclusion holds up well even though some of his analysis is already somewhat out of date.]