I've gotten to the part of The Paper where I talk about Lanham's The Electronic Word. Here's what I've got so far:

Is text always text, in the same manner that a rose is a rose is a rose? Print text remains static on the page. Electronic text not only enables but encourages interaction, as the reader/author can easily cut, paste, change fonts - and completely alter or delete text. Print text takes time and money to produce. Electronic text requires only time - anyone with enough time and access to a computer can crank it out. It is easily copied and distributed at the click of a mouse. Print text takes time, money and space to store. Electronic text is easily indexed. Entire encyclopedias reside on compact disks, which take up hardly any room at all.

In The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, Lanham debates these issues and the implications they pose for traditional copyright law. Copyright law was developed to address the needs of printed media - solid matter that we can hold in our hands. "Intellectual property in words may never have been rooted in a substance, an essence, but we could fool ourselves most of the time that it was," Lanham notes (19). The internet may have space, but it does not have substance - and neither does pixilated print.

Traditional copyright law provides protection from derivative works. Lanham views electronic text as potential incarnate (19). How, then, are we to protect the potential of a text? Should we even try to do so? And regardless of effort expended, is such a thing even feasible? It seems that an attempt to do so would be an attempt to assert ourselves as small gods - to claim to own the future. Yet, traditional copyright law attempts to do just this by providing protection from derivative works. These protections, which had their origins in the Statute of Anne and the Sayre Case of 1785, were constructed for a world that honored only print text (Lanham 134). They were constructed to protect the Great Works, sacred unto themselves. They were not built for a world that considers Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa to be art, and certainly not for a world that might celebrate the textual equivalent. As Lanham notes, "Electronic text and copyright law are steering a collision course at almost every point" (134).