• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 20, 2007

Many observers have said that copyright laws are out of touch with everyday experience. Now, University of Utah professor John Tehranian has laid out the case for that proposition in his law review article, "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Norm/Law Gap."

In the paper, he takes readers through a hypothetical day in the life of a law professor to show how he regularly violates at least the letter of the copyright law -- with each violation carrying a potential penalty of $150,000 in damages.

The total: Up to $12.45 million in fines for 83 infringements -- ranging from singing "Happy Birthday" to a friend (publicly performing a copyrighted musical composition) to going swimming without a t-shirt, and thereby revealing a shoulder tattoo of the Hanna-Barbera character Captain Caveman (unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work and unauthorized display of an animated character).

Of course, copyright laws aren't new -- and neither is singing "Happy Birthday" in public. But Tehranian argues that the difference now is that e-mail, camera phones, and other digital technology that we increasingly rely on create a record of infringement that can be used in court.

"The very technologies that enhance our media experiences are rapidly bringing us closer to the Panopticon state in which a near-total enforcement of intellectual property rights becomes viable," he writes.

Consider singing along with the stereo in the car -- a copyright infringement, though one that's never been enforced. He proposes a future scenario where cars come with voice recognition software that monitors the car for singing and then bills the owner licensing fees for having hummed along: "One can readily imagine a future dystopian world where the record labels, long since irrelevant to the development and distribution of new music, become nothing more than copyright trolls, drawing their revenue entirely from collections (or litigation) of this kind," he writes.

The article's especially timely given that the record industry shows no signs of backing away from its strategy of pursuing litigation against file-sharers, even as the biggest musicians are breaking away from their labels. In the last few months, while the record industry won a $220,000 judgment against single mother Jammie Thomas, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor (in collaboration with Saul Williams) were busy releasing albums for free online.

Given recent events, Tehranian's prediction that the record labels will be left with little other than trolling for piracy doesn't seem all that far-fetched.