Ever since the courts first began applying copyright law in cyberspace in the early 1990s, concerned observers have been polarized about whether, and to what degree, the Internet should be treated differently than conventional media. In the visionary polemics of the Internet gurus, the Copyright Act is an embarrassing relic of the hard-copy dark ages, which should be abolished altogether in the virtual utopia of the Internet. And if government does not take action to abolish it, it will simply wither and die of its own irrelevance. As John Perry Barlow phrased it in Wired magazine in early 1994, "Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum (which, in fact rather resembles what is being attempted here). We will need to develop an entirely new set of methods as befits this entirely new set of circumstances."1
