Digital technology spurs "copyright panic".

• Position: YOUR LIFE

New digital technologies and broadband Internet access have increased digital piracy of music, movies, and other creative products, but the threat of widespread digital piracy also has produced "copyright panic," spawning an illogical expansion of copyright protections in recent years, contends an intellectual property specialist at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.). "A lot of people in the legal community are concerned that copyright protections have gone too far," says Mark Bartholomew, visiting associate professor of law.

Bartholomew maintains that there has been an irrational expansion of secondary liability standards in copyright law in the face of such new digital technologies as mp3 players. This was illustrated famously when the courts ruled that Grokster and Napster, creators of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies, could be held liable for illegal copying performed by users of the companies' technology.

These rulings, Bartholomew insists, have expanded what once was a firm requirement of secondary liability: To be guilty of secondary copyright infringement, companies must have received a direct financial benefit as a result of the illegal use of a technology by another party. "In the past, money had to change hands to show secondary liability but, with Napster and Grokster, you had a hypothetical future revenue stream," Bartholomew explains. "This represents a dramatic expansion of the law."

In contrast, trademark law has not been subjected to a broadening of...