4. Jewels in the Sand: Supporting Creativity in a Mass Networked Environment

Stories like the Brennan player, reuse of intellectual property by search engines or the various cases surrounding Google Books highlight a dimension of the interplay between copyright and innovation and an accompanying dynamic involving the role of the judiciary. The examples sourced from the European side showed remarkable efforts of judges seeking out possibilities to remedy the situation, leading to solutions which all showed a considerable degree of creativity, but were all flawed in being necessarily inconsistent and questionably sustainable over the long term, particularly in going against the letter of the law which does not allow flexible exceptions that would apply to new technological developments. These dynamics will be analysed in more detail in the final chapter of this book. But before we delve deeper into the role of courts of law in safeguarding (or curtailing) technological innovation, an important question must be asked: is there a type of innovation that is uniquely bound to the history and nature of networked personal computing—and if yes, what makes it worth preserving?