While writing this an hour before the deadline, most of the technologies that I was thinking about writing about were obviously taken – the rewritable disc, the mp3 player, and the scanner/photocopier. So I tried to come up with something else. Then I read the assignment one more time. And then I copied and pasted the assignment:
- Name a technology (besides the VCR) that's legal to sell in our world, but the sale of which would constitute contributory copyright infringement in the alternate reality in which the Supreme Court in _Sony_ held for the plaintiff. Explain why it would be illegal, treating Justice Blackmun's opinion as authority. Be as imaginative as you can in your choice of technology.
And then it hit me. Left click, highlight, right click, copy, and paste. You can go to any website, highlight over any passage or picture, copy it, and do as you please with it. While not technically “for sale”, the copy and paste feature is inherent in every computer sold in the market today.
You can copy any passage. You can copy exact replicas of any picture. This copy and pasting would constitute contributory copyright infringement in Blackmun’s eyes. The copy/paste feature on any computer can be used for one’s own work and editing, but it is more likely to be used as copyright infringement. Any author’s, photographer’s, or artist’s work on the internet can be mine at the click of 2 buttons on my mouse without the author’s consent. How can this be legal?