For some years corporations have become increasingly insistent on owning, rather than licensing, intellectual property rights. Such rights subsequently appear on corporate balance sheets as assets, along with plant and machinery. In the climate of ownership rather than licensing, the digitisation of cultural products to which such rights attach has made corporations very nervous. There is a general perception that their IPR asset base is under siege. As a consequence, such corporate manipulators of copyright are attempting to tighten their grip on their assets.
Authors are ever more frequently being faced with demands to yield all rights under contract.
Some are resisting, some are not. It is this shift from copyright protection to contract protection that has such a potential for harm in the future. Both the author and the consumer will be tied to corporate owners under conditions under contract. This could have a direct bearing on the freedom to express opinion and to get that opinion published which in turn could have an effect on our system of democratic government. To summarise, copyright for authors has been both a legal and an ethical framework which has supported the creation of new work.