This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 9, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

You've broken these laws many times, and you'll do it again.

The US system of copyrights is out of step with custom, but since the laws are rarely

enforced, is it really a problem?

Tom Bell argues in his book, Intellectual Privilege, Copyright, Common Law, and The Common Good, that copyright reform

is needed now more than ever.

With respect to copyright in the United States, there's this tension between what is well established custom with respect to all

sorts of creative works.

Internet memes are very popular and on the other side of that you have the letter of the law

that says most of these things are

illegal and punishable.

So what do we do to resolve that tension?

Well I agree that there is this tension in U.S. copyright law.

Much of what we take as matter of course is copyright infringing, strictly speaking.

What do we do about that?

In practice, we ignore copyright law, but we do that at our

peril. I think it's not good public policy where most of us, every day, are in theory

susceptible to hundreds of thousands of dollars and

damages. Long term what we ought to do is reconfigure copyright law. I'm afraid

right now there's not much prospect of that but simply raising consciousness

about this very unpleasant circumstance ought to help reforms.

...