The Economist

About the author: The Economist is a British weekly magazine covering international affairs.

Intellectual property—including art, databases, music, and software —is increasingly the target of copyright infringement. Copyright owners are losing much money as their property is pirated from the Internet, copied, and illegally sold. Copyright infringement is likely to increase as digital technology and the Internet grow and make it easy to copy or alter many forms of intellectual property. Efforts by producers and exporters to increase copyright protection will likely diminish private citizens' access to free information.

"The Internet is one gigantic copying machine," says David Nimmer, a Los Angeles lawyer who spends his time advising owners of intellectual property on their rights to their evanescent assets. "All copyrighted works can now be digitised, and once on...