This is an important aspect of the problem. Copywritten works were intended to fall into the public domain after the author had a reasonable amount of time to profit from his work.
Having a large and rich public domain inventory is important for society. This continual tighting of fair use and lengthening of copywrites will threaten to choke our culture in Regulations and licenses. Especially in the digital age, forcing such a draconian system of laws regulating the transfer of data will have a chilling effect on new cultural works. How would you like to write a song and be sued by the corporation holding the rights to some obscure song from 200 years ago which just happens to match the beat and chord changes that yours does?
We need to be able to access important works in the future so that it can be studied, reinvented, made fresh and built upon. How many times has Shakespeare been run on Broadway, in film, and in the plots of countless close knock-offs? How many of those would have been made if the estate of Shakespeare still held the copywrite and charged licensing fees? How many high school productions and community theatres would never have shown the work?
I’ve battled in too many of these debates before and don’t really have time to do so again, but I’d like to repeat a question I’ve asked before: How will authors and artists continue to profit from their works, if these works can automatically and quickly be copied? I understand that you say that musicians can still make money off performing, but how will this help the author or artist? Why would an author or artist release their work if they knew that it would immediately be copied and displayed everywhere, with no money going to them (the artist)?
responding to yosemitebabe - Currently, a vast majority of musicians get no benefit from the distribution of copyrighted works, quite the opposite. The current system sucks all the money out of the market, and channels it into marketing leaving next to nothing for performers / creators. Most working musicians are only paid for their time, and have no stake in the copyright business.
The current problem has been brewing for a while eg. throughout the nineties a lively electronic / dance music scene spawned its own sounds and distribution network, completely bypassing the traditional recording industry. The majors are now firmly on board, but the people who are getting rich are certainly not the original creators - they are simply “businessmen/musicians” who have re-packaged (and copyrighted) other people’s work, and the music distribution industry.
The handful of music industry stars are in no way representative of the average musician’s experience, and are, if anything an obtacle to creativity (same as any artificially maintained monopoly situation).
IMO, if the money for the music marketing industry really does dry up due to file sharing (remains to be seen…) - both musicians and the public will be better off.
I’m assuming that Levine’s page still has the link to the model they use. Levine, et al. includes an assumption that people have a time preference, which seems pretty fair to me. Considering that downloading a single song from a P2P network is a royal pain in the ass, that doesn’t seem like an out of line assumption. If I wanted to buy an album, I wouldn’t download the whole thing since it would be way too much of a hassle.
I’ve heard a rumor that most of the money musicians make is from concerts, anyway. Which is not to say that distributors don’t deserve their fair share…
I think the authors and artists yosemitebabe was referring to are the non-musical type. A musician who gives away copies of his songs for free can still make money from live performances and merchandise, but what about the author of a novel, or the creator of a painting?
One thing I can think of is licensing the use of his works in others’ works, like a movie studio paying an author to make a movie from his novel, or paying an artist to show his paintings in the background of a set. I’m sure some others here can come up with more ideas (I probably could, if it weren’t 6 AM).
But this isn’t the same old copyright thread where we wonder how these folks will make money without a legal monopoly. The fact is, books and paintings aren’t traded online enough to impact the authors and artists, even though they’re much smaller than songs and movies. Novelists and painters don’t need a new economic model; their old one is still working.
Well, people have time preferences for pretty much everything, as far as I know. By that, people tend to prefer something sooner rather than later. I suppose one could disagree; however, the lines I observed for the latest LOTR flick are but one of myriad examples demonstrating to my satisfaction that some people will want to consume something now rather than later. That is all that is really needed.
I just added the pain in the ass bit. My experience, before P2P file sharing became verboten here in the States, was that even mainstream stuff was a hassle. Finding one wasn’t too bad, but actually downloading the whole file in an uncorrupted manner wasn’t. Of course it’s been a while, since I am a scrupulously good citizen online–my proclivity for hit-and-run posting notwithstanding.
OK, but without some legally enforceable Intellectual Property, Mr2001 how will an author require that movie studios pay him?
I agree that the copyright legislation of late seems to be an abuse. Copyrights as originally envisioned were a limited monoply. That’s how they prevented monopolies. By preserving them for a limited time (so the author could benifit) and then completely busting them.
Books and paintings are not traded online becasue you cannot produce anything like the copies you can get from the publisher at home. The printing and binding technology is not up to producing books at home yet. Also, the scanning technology is not on a par with the comparible ripping technology of cdroms. These differences are irrelevant when considering the principles surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyrights. But they are difinitive when considering how much traffic in copyrighted material crosses the net.
IOW, the only difference between the demand for online music and online books is the ease of creating them from other’s work. If every person who offered for trade an online song had to create and record that song himself, or pay the artist who did, the amount of online music would decrease sharply.
But your right. This isn’t the same old copyright thread. The OP asked what sort of changes to our current economic model is required to allow artists, distributors, and consumers everything they want. At the risk of make this question even more difficult, I’d like to suggest that it is not expansive enough. The primary difficulty I see with our current economic model is that trading online is unregulated. If we conclude that the unpoliciable nature of the internet requires us to give up copyrights, then what about national security regulations? If I can copy music or books and circumvent copyrights simply because I do it online, why can’t I copy classified material (that I have access to) as long as I only broadcast it online?
What I am trying to say, is that the part of the equation that we may change in the near future may be the regulation of internet transactions, rather than the nature of copyrights.
You can’t compare the hassle of downloading movies and popular songs. In movies, not only the content but the environment matters, like the sound system and the screen size. Additionally, movies are MUCH larger files to download with comparatively less number of sharers. Even if you get a continuous decent-ratedownload of a movie, it still takes more than a few hours to download. A popular song, OTOH, takes 10 minutes. I’m not sure what you mean by the ‘uncorrupted’ part. There exist reasons to not participate in P2P, but file corruption isn’t one of them.
I’m not trying to. You are mixing together two separate issues. The first is that lots of people prefer things sooner than later w/ movie lines being one of many examples. The second is that downloading popular songs from P2P networks can be, and often is, a real hassle. You are welcome to disagree. I am basing this observation on first hand experience, so we’ll just have to accept that our experiences differ on this.
I don’t think anyone serious is advocating the abolishment of copyrights. Maybe a few of the “Information should be freeeeee!!” radicals, but certainly not me.
The big problem as I see it is that using technology to enforce copyrights squashes ‘fair use’ rights and threatens to infringe on our civil liberties (for example, we’ve already had the RIAA gathering personal information with subpeonas that were not written by the courts, and we’ve had legislators present bills that would allow the RIAA to hack our computers and destroy our private property at their whim).
What we need to do is to come up with a new definition of ‘fair use’ that fits in with the digital age and protects those important rights. We also need to roll back some of the copyright extensions that the entertainment industry has pushed through congress after spending millions on election campaigns.
It should always be illegal to take someone’s copyritten work and re-distribute it for profit. From there, we have to look at other scenarios and re-evaluate their legality.
Okay, I’m promising myself to not get so deeply sucked into this debate (yet again) but since it is a little different this time I’d like to clarify my quesiton and present the current situation that I’m in now:
I’m working on a book. It’s a “how to” book and a companion to a website I have. So far people have liked the site and have asked for me to write a book. So that’s what I’m doing.
Even though I don’t intend to sell an e-Book, (it’ll only be available in print form) a PDF version of it exists, since it is needed to send to the printers. I certainly don’t intend to “share” this PDF version, but I can’t physically stop someone else from doing so.
What do you think should, or could, legally happen to this PDF version? Should people be able to “share” this PDF version, as long as it’s not for profit? What controls should be put on the distribution of this version? Should I entitled to stop others from “sharing” my PDF book, even though they are not making any profit from it?
That’s fair enough, Sam Stone. I agree that recent laws regarding copyrights have gone too far. Also, I agree that the “digital age” calls into question many of our notions of fair use. However, I think most of the problems are of enforcement not of the generally accepted principle. That is, we have pretty much relied on a case by case evaluation of fair use in the past, and digital technology may move too fast for this to work in the future.
It seems that the current state of the law (IANAL, BTW) allows individuals to make copies for their own use. This seems perfectly acceptable. For instance, people can make a copy of a tape to listen to while keeping the original in pristeen condition. It oesn’t, however, allow anyone to distribute exact copies. This is where the law comes into conflict with P2P sharing of cdroms.
It seems to me, that a certain quality of copy could be deemed fair use. That is, if the copy quality was not exact, and the copies were not sold, then perhaps thier distribution could be termed fair use. Kind of like quoting from books. I’m just pulling this out if you know what I mean.
Have every ISP charge every customer, say $10 per year, to download music. Then, work with the Kazaa people to keep track of which artists are downloaded how many times. Then, take all the $10s collected by the ISPs and distribute the pot proportionately among all the artists.
Obviously, there would be many details to iron out, but that’s the basic idea.
Flash-57’s post reiterates a proposed economic model called Compulsory Licensing. It’s premise is this: once a copyrighted work gets created and can be shared at virtually no cost, there is no reason why it shouldn’t be. The way you make this practical is you impose a universal tax, put all work into the public domain, and having tracked the actual usage (this part isn’t as tricky as it sounds), divide the revenue among the artists based on popularity. The amount people would end up paying would not in any way be more than what they pay now, and would probably be less once you throw out the marketing executives, glitz, and other unnecessary excesses. The benefit is that a lot more music would go around and be enjoyed. That and the fact that information sharing in the communication age is inescapable and must be accepted and not opposed.
In fact, this idea isn’t all that new. The library system works in a very similar way, and surely everyone is better for it.
However, copyrights are just the tip of the iceberg. The fallacy of intellectual property is far more detrimental when one considers patents.
I have been working on a paper on a theory I call Informational Socialism, which deals with intellectual property in the Information Age as a whole. It’s still a work in progress, and i would appreciate input and debate. It’s too much to copy and paste, so i’ll provide a link:
Seems obvious. But you supported the “time assumption” as a fair assumption. However, the definition of ‘now’ and ‘later’ for music and movies are quite different. You can’t use an illustration of an assumption from the movie aspect to support a new model for music (which is the primary trading material on P2P). The ‘later’ for music releases is on the order of hours since all that’s required is for someone to rip the CD and share.
People might be more willing to wait those hours for music and not want to wait days/months for movies.So, for reasons mentioned in my earlier post, movie-industry remodelling can rely more on the “time assumption”, not so much the music industry.
I assumed that copyright law would stay the same, and I was merely proposing a new business model. I have no desire to go through the same old copyright vs. free speech debate again.
It’s true that scanning in a book is harder than ripping a CD, but I don’t think the quality difference or lack of printing/binding is really important.
A lot of MP3s are poor quality compared to a CD, but people still trade them. A lot of movies are poor quality compared to a DVD–many of them are cheap copies made with a camcorder in a crowded theater–but people still trade them.
The people who download music and movies from P2P networks are willing to trade convenience and quality for price. I think they’d also be willing to read a book on their computer instead of printing it out. Just think of how much time people spend reading eBooks and web sites (coughSDMBcough) on their computers.
No, I think there are other reasons that books and paintings aren’t traded online. For one, people who use P2P to decide whether an album or movie is worth buying have no analogue in books and art - people don’t expect to read an entire book before they buy it, and nothing is stopping them from looking at a painting before they buy it.
second, digital books have a huge advantage over regular books in two respects: searchability and portability. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before college students start scanning their textbooks and other material and sharing the files, carrying them to class on laptops. It would cut on their huge costs, too. Also, scanned books aren’t left in image format, they’re converted to text via OCR, so there’s no loss of quality.
I think there are several reasons why books are not traded like music is. I agree that previewing books and paintings is important. But doesn’t radio provide a similar service? At lease when compared to libraries? Not identical, I understand, but similar. Also, I’ve seen preview headphones in music stores before.
I’m not aware of any studies, but I’d be surprised if more than a small percentage of the downloaded music was downloaded by people who had never heard it before.
If we leave the basic premise of copyright untouched, there are many models that might allow trading of at least some music. The Creative Commons that Snag pointed to seems to be a GPL like concept. Where authors allow their works to be distributed in certain pre determined ways. I’m not sure I see a problem with the Apple initiative either. I found that Walmart allows people to download music also. Something like $0.88 per song. It also allows you to preview the songs. The price may seem a little high, but I think the model certainly applies to out OP.
Here’s the page you guys will probably want to read on this subject- from my “Economics of Information-based Goods” professor, Dr. Stan Liebowitz. He’s something of an authority on the economics of file sharing and the tech industry in general.