Timothy Wu, professor of law at the Univ. of Virginia's School of Law and prolific guest blogger on Larry Lessig's blog, discusses a simple question asked of a group of law professors: what will copyright look like in eight years? (Copyright in Eight Years). Wu's list includes:

1. Primarily a criminal regime (remember when copyright was considered civil law?)
2. Focused on control of the design of hardware & software (in the model of the Broadcast Flag) to prevent infringement ex ante;
3. A regime dedicated to preserving the retail market and revenue streams for 4 discs: (CDs, DVDs, Software CDs, and Video-Game CDs), having given up on nearly everything else;
4. Made in WIPO or the FCC as often as the U.S. Congress;
5. Gone (not a good bet).
6. Alternative compensation systems developing outside the U.S.

Copyright law will be increasingly made behind the scenes of WIPO, the FCC and the Copyright Office. Regulatory capture doesn't begin to describe how far in the pocket of the content industries these organizations are. WIPO was built to serve the interests of the copyright cartels and force their will upon governments through international treaty. The Copyright Office loudly pushes an agenda even the RIAA only whispers. And the less said about Michael Powell's "commitment" to free markets and deregulation, the better. With the exception of the FCC to a very limited extent, none of these organization cares remotely about public opinion. Consumer rights simply do not factor into the equation.

Other than my certainty that intellectual property law will be made increasingly outside the confines of representative bodies, I'm not sure what else can be said about it. Eight years ago, would law professors have predicted the emergence of the original Napster, followed by decentralized filesharing services? How about Bit Torrent? RSS? Broadcatching? Didn't think so.

This isn't an argument about technological determinism or triumphalism. I don't know what is going to happen, I just know there will be change. The problem with existing copyright law is that it is not based on any principles. It has devolved into a morass of competing claims designed to protect particular business models and corporate interests. Rapidly changing technology is undermining those long settled compromises between industries and the law can't keep up to maintain the balance. Future technological changes will undermine whatever shifts in the law occur during the next few years. Remember how the DMCA was supposed to solve the problem of the internet?

In eight years, we will have had about four more iterations of Moore's Law, as well as similar growth in storage and bandwidth. In eight years, there should be cellphones with hard drives as big as the drives in the current iPods and capable of out-processing my 4-year old laptop. Everything is going to be capable of massive amounts of storage. I'm not going to venture any more guesses at technology here, but storage increases alone are going to jumble things around even more. How, I'm not entirely sure, but traditional notions of copyright law as compromise and balancing of existing interests ain't gonna cut it. What will happen to copyright law when open source takes over the desktop?

Will copyright law go away? Absolutely not. However, copyright law will have to be based on principle, not traditional corporate compromise.