In the face of a pandemic, copyright law may seem a frivolous concern; but its importance lies in the ever-expanding role that it plays in either enabling or constraining the kinds of communicative activities that are critical to a flourishing life. In this article, we reflect on how the cultural and educative practices that have burgeoned under quarantine conditions shed new light on a longstanding problem: the need to recalibrate the copyright system to better serve its purposes in the face of changing social and technological circumstances. We begin by discussing how copyright restrictions have manifested in a variety of contexts driven by the coronavirus lockdown, focusing first on creative engagement and then on learning, foregrounding the damage done by encoding a permission-first approach into governance structures and digital platforms. These stories unsettle the common copyright narrative-the one that tells us that copyright encourages learning and the creation and dissemination of works-laying bare its disconnect from the current realities of our digital dependency. Turning to consider the justifications for copyright control, we underscore the critical role of user rights and substantive technological neutrality in crafting a flexible and fair copyright system for the future. The article concludes with some lessons that might be drawn from these tales of copyright in the time of COVID19 to inform the development of new digital copyright norms for whatever "new normal" emerges.

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This article proposes the “rules mutable game” as a metaphor for understanding the operation of copyright reform. Using the game of Calvinball (created by artist Bill Watterson in his long-running comic strip Calvin & Hobbes) as an illustrative device, and drawing on public choice theory’s account of how political change is effected by privileged interests, the article explores how the notion of a game in which players can modify the rules of the game while it is being played accounts for how users are often disadvantaged in copyright reform processes. The game metaphor also introduces a normative metric of fairness into the heart of the assessment of the copyright reform process from the standpoint of the user. The notion of a rules mutable game tells us something important about the kinds of stories we should be telling about copyright and copyright reform. The narrative power of the “fair play” norm embedded in the concept of the game can facilitate rhetoric which does not just doom users to dwell on their political losses, but empowers them to strategize for future victories.

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Metal Additive Manufacturing (MAM) has had a tremendous impact in reimagining the design and manufacture of products in a number of industries. The use of MAM to directly produce products continues to be investigated; however, the area of manufacturing tooling has yet to be fully explored. MAM provides a unique opportunity to introduce features that make manufacturing tooling better equipped to efficiently produce complex products. A recent example includes MAM produced molds for the injection molding industry. MAM, in this case, provides the ability to introduce unique features, such as cooling channels, that could not be introduced practically with SM processes. This study explores the use of MAM towards the engineering and design of Extrusion Die Tooling for plastic extruded products. Plastic extrusion is a high-volume manufacturing process for a broad range of products from tubing to window frames. These extruded plastic products come in not only a range of sizes, but also different polymer materials. A series of extrusion dies are currently needed in the process in order to achieve the final shape of the product. These dies are effectively designed in two dimensional Computer Aided Design (CAD) packages, because of the current preferred method of fabrication, wire Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM). This study explores the effect of MAM on the extrusion die engineering design process. The explored cases center on common extruded plastic products including tubing and constant wall U-channels. The study first describes how sets of extrusion dies are currently designed in CAD in order to produce the desired extruded product features with established advanced manufacturing processes (EDM). The study then details the effect of using the MAM alternative on the design process, CAD methods selected, and the extrusion die features. The impact of MAM on the extruded die design process are discussed in order to provide guidelines for when it should be considered in order to effectively achieve features on the described extruded plastic products.