Privacy And Copyright — An Increasingly Volatile Mixture

While privacy issues have not historically been of major concern to copyright lawyers, the increased importance of privacy issues generally and the desire of some copyright owners to obtain increasing amounts of information about individual users of copyright works has put these two areas of law on a collision course. This article examines two copyright issues where privacy concerns have recently made an impact.

To say that the Internet has posed a problem for many copyright owners is to state the obvious. The ease with which digital copies of copyright works can be created and distributed has made the prevention of wide scale piracy increasingly difficult. At the same time, infringement investigations and actions, in many cases, have had to shift their emphasis from larger scale criminal organizations and groups to interdict the