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to be on the panel. Harvey Saferstein, a well-respected lawyer from an L.A. firm, introduced the panel with a video that he and a friend, Robert Fairbank, had produced.
The video was a brilliant collage of film from every period in the twentieth century, all framed around the idea of a 60 Minutes episode. The execution was perfect, down to the sixty-minute stopwatch. The judges loved every minute of it.
When the lights came up, I looked over to my copanelist, David Nimmer, perhaps the leading copyright scholar and practitioner in the nation. He had an astonished look on his face, as he peered across the room of over 250 well-entertained judges. Taking an ominous tone, he began his talk with a question: "Do you know how many federal laws were just violated in this room?"
For of course, the two brilliantly talented creators who made this film hadn't done what Alben did. They hadn't spent a year clearing the rights to these clips; technically, what they had done violated the law. Of course, it wasn't as if they or anyone were going to be prosecuted for this violation (the presence of 250 judges and a gaggle of federal marshals notwithstanding). But Nimmer was making an important point: A year before anyone would have heard of the word Napster, and two years before another member of our panel, David Boies, would defend Napster before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Nimmer was trying to get the judges to see that the law would not be friendly to the capacities that this technology would enable. Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.
We live in a "cut and paste" culture enabled by technology. Anyone building a presentation knows the extraordinary freedom that the cut and paste architecture of the Internet created--in a second you can find just about any image you want; in another second, you can have it planted in your presentation.
But presentations are just a tiny beginning. Using the Internet a
