The recording industry has vowed to make 2002 the year of the copyright.
If the industry has its way, this will be the year when we begin purchasing music in forms that cannot be stolen. Compact discs will begin to include technology that prevents them being copied. And online, music will be sold through subscription services that stop unauthorised reproduction. 2002 could become the year when copyright fights back.
If the technology works, it could transform the fortunes of copyright holders. Up to now, they have fallen easy prey to any teenager who could type the characters "MP3" into a search engine: the theft of copyrighted music online has been virtually effortless.
But if technology switches sides, if it now facilitates not theft but the perfect control of who listens to what, when, on the internet, US copyright owners could find themselves wielding far more power than was ever intended under US copyright law or the constitution.
Courts and lawmakers are facing that old question with new urgency: how much copyright is too much? How can copyright law reward creators without allowing them to monopolise their creation in ways that would chill future innovation?
Even the US Supreme Court, which intervenes only rarely in matters of intellectual property law, is this month considering the question of copyright. The justices are expected to announce shortly whether they will hear a case that challenges the ascendancy of copyright. That case argues that the existing American social and legal bargain over copyright is flawed even without the intervention of technologies that could destabilise it even further.
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and theorist of the digital society, has seized on the case to challenge the recent course of US copyright law, which has expanded the scope and duration of copyright at the expense of public access to works.
He filed the lawsuit on behalf of Eric Eldred, who wanted to compile an electronic archive of unusual and out-of-print works online but was prevented from posting some works by a 1998 law extending the term of copyright protection.
Prof Lessig argues that Congress has exceeded its constitutional authority by repeatedly extending the term of copyrights - 11 times in the past 40 years. The 1998 law alone extended copyright by 20 years: works copyrighted by individuals since 1978 were granted a term of 70 years beyond the life of the author; works made by or for corporations were protected for 95 years. The extension applied to existing works even if the author was dead or the work long out of print.
For Prof Lessig, these extensions violate the constitution's command to Congress that it "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Copyrights of such length are no longer "limited", he argues; and Congress can scarcely claim to "promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts" when it extends the copyright of dead authors. Copyrights are meant not to reward authors but to serve as an incentive to creation.
Prof Lessig argues that every time Congress extends copyright it impoverishes the public domain and stifles innovation. Creativity builds on itself: without reasonable public access to copyrighted works, it has nothing to build on.
But if that situation is bad, how much worse a world in which copyrights are not just long but unlimited? Copy protection technology can stop creative material from entering the public domain, not just until its copyright expires but for ever. Locked CDs may theoretically lose their copyright but that will not unlock them. Such technologies risk giving copyright owners an absolute monopoly over content for ever - a far cry from the limited monopoly outlined by the constitution.
US lawmakers have begun to ask whether record companies can guard against digital copying without violating US copyright law. Last week Rick Boucher, who heads the Congressional internet caucus, wrote to record companies asking whether anti-piracy technology might override consumers' legal right to copy music purchased for use in car tape-players or other devices.
At last the issue of copyright ascendancy is on the table. Technologies of copyright control will almost certainly transform that debate beyond all recognition. At that point, tinkering with the legal regime may not be enough.
In his recent book The Future of Ideas*, Prof Lessig recommends a radical revision of copyright law: copyright protection should be cut to five years, renewable 15 times. Where copyrights were not renewed, the work would enter the public domain.
"The benefit for creativity from more works falling into the commons would be large," he argues.
US lawmakers may not like his suggestion but they ignore the looming copyright crisis at society's peril. Technology has precipitated the crisis; law cannot long ignore it.
* The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, by Lawrence Lessig, Random House, $30