Aff is not just untopical, it’s antitopical! It weakens copyright protections.

An appropriate starting point here is Abraham Drassinower's claim that the normative heart of copyright law resides, not in the right to control unauthorized copying as such, but in what he calls the right of public presentation: an author's exclusive right to address the public, in his or her own words, in the form of a work.123 Copyright law, Drassinower argues, necessarily takes authorial activity to be an in stance of speech. All of its central categories - including in particular the exclusive rights of the author and the major defenses available to users of copyright material - should, he argues, be (re-) interpreted in relation to a conceptualization of works of authorship as communications to the public.124 This would limit the current scope of copy right protection, because when re-interpreted in this way, not every act of copying can properly be regarded as infringing. Only repro ductions of the work qua communicative act - or reproductions which are 'in the service of public presentation'125 - are normatively relevant; copies which are reproductions only 'in the physical sense'126 are not. Copies made for personal use would fall into the second category, as would copies technically incidental to the reception of the work, such as cache copies or digital copies made while browsing online. More over, to reproduce another's work as a work (i.e. to repeat the communicative act represented by the work) is - properly construed - not simply to re-communicate another's work, but to 'wrongfully place [one]self in another's position as an author'.127 What Drassinower has in mind here, evidently, is any adoption of another's communicative act as one's own, and in a way which also involves its public presentation. There is no such adoption where A independently creates and communicates a work that coincidentally bears a similarity to a pre existing work authored by B: the similarity, rightly in Drassinower's view, does not constitute a basis for finding A liable to B. There should equally be no liability, in his view, if A's use of the earlier work, though deliberate, is reasonably necessary for his or her own exercise of authorship,128 for in such a case A is addressing the public on his or her own account. (It is this interpretation of the wrong involved in copyright infringement that grounds Drassinower's arguments, noted in the Introduction above, about the legal position of transformative re-users of copyright material.) Aspects of copyright law, Drassinower argues, already recognize this fundamental reciprocity between actual and potential future authors. One example is the so-called idea /expression dichotomy: the principle that where one author has not copied another author's expression but has instead expressed the latter's idea anew, s /he has shown independent authorship and cannot be impugned for tres passing on another's authorship.129 Another example is the defense available for using a work as part of an exercise in criticism or review of that work. However other aspects of the current law - including many of those yielded by its recent expansionary tendencies - fail to acknowledge the equal authorial freedom of addressees. To remedy this, Drassinower suggests that at least some defences and exceptions to copyright protection - the vast majority of which currently give rise to nothing more than user 'privileges' and as such are vulnerable to being overridden by digital rights management systems and the contractual ordering of user privileges that these enable - should be placed on a firmer legal foundation by being characterised as user 'rights'.130 The fundamental user right, he suggests, is the right to engage with (as opposed to merely repeating), and respond publicly to, works of authorship in ways that reasonably require the use of those works. This is as integral to copyright law as the authorial right of public presentation, because it too protects authorial freedom. 'Equality, then, is the category that would make intelligible the connection between author rights and user rights as aspects of the copyright system'.131 The domain protected by copyright and the public domain (i.e. the reservoir of intellectual materials that may be freely drawn upon in authorial activity) must thus be seen as two moments of a single integrated structure oriented towards guaran teeing equal authorial freedom for all.