We could go into how it could be worse if you wish. For the rest of the attempted hijack, as much as I hate to say it, the current administration has not screwed up the patent and copyright system any worse than it is - in fact I’m not aware that they have messed with it at all.
No, it seems that many people won’t do something ethically wrong if there is a law against it. Civil societies don’t work totally by force, but more by consent - and you can see what happens when this breaks down all over the world. Other people may try to get away with something, but will back down when confronted. Relatively few (and none of the people my wife deals with) need force to follow the rules.
As a native New Yorker, I fail to see how anyone living in New York can see anarchy as anything but a total disaster.
The reason that this is a tough problem is the need for balance between freedom and the incentive for creating information. No one is going to spend $100 million to make a movie if it can be downloaded for free the day it opens. On the other hand, locking information up forever is bad also. Copyright and patent laws have terms to try to balance this, we can argue that the terms have gotten too long.
When I was in college you could photocopy a book - but it cost more to do than buying the book in the first place, and you got something very hard to handle. You could (and I did) copy records into tape, but you had to find the records and it took a long time. Therefore the limits to piracy were built into the technology. I’m not sure information wants to be free in general, but digital information does, which is why it’s an issue now.
I never mentioned the current administration, it’s deeper and more systemic than that.
But that was predicated on the threat of force at some point in history. And some people consent, which is what validates the law, but force is kept there to make sure others toe the line.
I am not advocating anarchy. I am saying it’s what we have. There’s a difference. The government has deligitimized itself by propagandizing freedom while taking it away. Cops could be patrolling parks at night rather than seeking out drug dealers. That would improve the quality of life by giving us safe parks, meanwhile not wasting funds trying to force people into a certain behavior that a large percentage of the population WANTS to engage in.
Now onto copyrights and patents. Because of the frivolity of the corporate megaliths in their aquisition of copyrights and patents, it has eroded respect for such patents, making a large percentage apathetic to such protections of intellectual property.
Personally as an artist and purveyor of intellectual property, I feel that the protections are unecessary. They only protect one who wishes to benefit from their work for an extended period of time. There are business models where one can be paid for the production of the service. Also, as far as the world of the artist goes, most artists I know live off of a sort of communal lifestyle anyway, and they benefit in ways that are non-monetary. I have 10,000 watts of speakers in my basement because my friend needed storage, so I am going to throw a party down there with them on Saturday. Nothing copyrighted has passed between us. The closest thing to intellectual property that’s been an issue in my time of working with and hanging out with this guy, was an executive summary for his biodiesel business, which generally is the kind of thing going to one who you’d like to be disseminating that information.
I find intellectual property rights to be relatively unecessary. Keep in mind that I do live in New York, I do understand and participate in capitalism, and I have protected my own intellectual property within a system where it’s necessary, but my way is the way that the technology is going. You have cultures of people who produce great works making them free, such as Sun with Open Office, and every open source programmer out there. Open source hardware is starting to come about too, so you pay for the service, not for the rights to the property. The distribution of the economy is going to shift things around as it redistributes itself with the internet, which makes going to the exact person yuo need to find straighter to the source, cutting out several middle-men, which are the people who are generally the ones who are most concerned about their property rights being protected because they can’t produce it themselves, they have to have fancy contractual arrangements with the producer and the client. If you’re doing media, make your shit free and find ways to profit off of the product placement and clickthroughs on your website or something. If it’s a painting then only the original matters, sell nice posters on your website for reasonable prices and they’ll come to you for the artwork.
The system is eroding, face it, the UN is coming up with a universal property rights system supposedly, but we’ll see if that pans out. I think the people no intellectual property rights would hurt is the big fatcats. I mean come on, do we really need pharmaceutical companies if we have people willing to study herbal remedies, that can be rigorously tested and verified just as easily as chemical pills, they won’t even need some ridiculously expensive synthesis process. People are using different herbal remedies all over the world, it’s just that the information hasn’t properly been disseminated.
I really don’t see patents as being necessary, and I think that the byzantine corporate hierarchy that is the world government makes so little sense to most people that you’re going to find people being kind of apathetic to the law, because it just seems arbitrary after a certain point. Maybe we really don’t need corporate fat cats. Don’t kill em, just don’t participate in their system on their terms.
I think the corporate part comes from the expense and technology of movie (and video game) creation, not copyright. Certainly writers are not corporatized - except in part due to the giant publshing conglomerates. There is still a thriving independent movie business, but distribution does not seem to be as easy as it was in the '50s and '60s.
Copyright tries to recover the cost of production by limiting distribution. Is it worth it to not have any $100 million movies to make distribution free? I don’t think it will happen - computer game production is getting more and more expensive, and that is because people want the bells and whistles.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Without a replacement model, there’s no reason to abandon the notion of copyright.
Just because current copyright terms are unreasonably long, which I won’t even pretend I find arguable (although some would), that does not render the concept of copyright unreasonable.
The physical barrier to information access (the need to buy the physical items: books, CDs, tapes, etc.) has all but disappeared. I think we can all acknowledge that the bulk of new music is purchased by those in their teens and twenties.
And those people are not buying physical items anymore. I teach high school, and we just began a unit on intellectual property. Out of fifty students, not one buys CDs as their primary means of consuming music. They all download, and most prefer to do it for free. Admittedly, I teach mostly wealthy students, but we are not far off from this being the standard case for all income levels.
Prior to this, we had both the physical barrier and the social contract to preserve the enforcability of copyright as means of maintaining the financial incentive to keep creating.
Very soon, we will only have the social contract, and there are too many people who regard that as a charming anachronism to make that viable.
My students like to argue that what artists might lose in recording royalties, they can make up by touring. Indeed, the essential reference, Daniel Passman’s All You Need to Know About the Music Business clearly points out that standard artist contracts show much higher potentiel profits from tours than CDs.
Indeed, ticket prices rose in the face of downloading to make up for the deficit, but sales finally declined sharply last year.
So this year, the price came down, and sales still declined. So people aren’t paying for recordings, and they aren’t going to see concerts. Why should any musician do anything but keep their own music to themselves and get a day job?
You’d have to go a long way to convince me that society is in any way better off by silencing voices rather than encouraging them.
The “free information” crowd keeps pushing this notion that artists are just going to have to get used to not making any real money for their work, as though that’s actually going to fly long term.
That same Daniel Passman published a new edition of his book shortly after the appearance of Napster. While very bleak for the short term, he had no worries about the long term. He recounts how, during the French Revolution, they initially did away with all copyright laws. And publishing did in fact decline sharply. Authors never got used to the notion that they didn’t deserve to be compensated. And the laws came back.
In the end, people still want music, and artists will still get payed for it as time goes on. There are two possible outcomes.
People will continue to assert their right to not pay for the information others have created for their consumption, and technological advances will back them up by continually increasing their ability to access information without compensation. So the artists will have to be subsidized, either by the government (who can’t even see their way clear to subsidizing healthcare, nevermind entertainment), or business. So you’d see a trend where all downloads are free, but have commercials attached. Or are commercials themselves. Sure, people will still use home studios and computers to provide music as a hobby, but there’s only so much time and effort you can afford to devote to that sort of thing without compensation, so the variety and quality will both decrease in that area. The quality stuff requires pay, and those who pay want something in exchange.
ISTM that the free info crowd is hoping that this is the outcome, and that the stuff that’s not paid for will be better and more voluminous than the commercial stuff that is. Don’t count on it.
OR
The market will continue to increase for technology that can help in the enforcement of copyright, and entrepreneurial types will meet that need, as they are beginning to do now. The status quo returns, but hopefully with a sober review of copyright laws with a look to reducing the length of the term of protection.
I know quite a bit about this. I have written about open source hardware, I am currently organizing a workshop on open source CAD tools, and I have gotten a real ASIC design donated by its owner and thrown open to help academics without access to real designs work on researching new design methods.
Remember that the various licenses used by open source tools are possible only because of copyright. How could we prevent some company from grabbing an open source contribution and sticking it into a proprietary package without copyright? I assure you that open source works because it is supported by companies for their own purposes. Sun supports open office.org for reasons I won’t get into. No significant stuff is done anymore by people in their basements in their spare time.
The great thing about copyright is that it gives you the flexibility to sell your stuff in the way you mention. No one is saying that should be prohibited - only that content owners who want a different business model should be able to use one, with the needs of society for the spread of information and innovation respected.
Middlemen have little to do with ownership rights. They exist because of some business need, and if technology eliminates them, fine with me. Maybe record stores will disappear - that could easily happen no matter what the copyright position is, and maybe easier if creators could stick really good copy protection on their work.
There are certainly work for hire models where copyright is not a big issue. You say you protect your work - but what if it could be copied and distributed for free. If you get $X for your work, would you really want to give up the opportunity for getting N * $X? Even if you do, should no one have this opportunity? Paintings are one type of thing that can’t be digitized yet, since the copy is not as good as the original. Would someone pay as much for the first painting if he knew there would be 1,000 identical copies? Wouldn’t the maximum benefit to society be letting many people have the benefit of art while giving the creator of the art reasonable benefits?
Well with the project www.evolvetv.tv we produced the episodes and made them free. Who knows where the business model will go, but I seriously doubt the videos will ever be protected for any reason.
We’re working on a cartoon called “Death Mask of Putin” where Vladmir Putin is ninjaing his way out of a Kremlin compromised by agents of Don Khodorkovsky. We probably won’t be worrying much about copyright, as we’ll be offering it for free.
Well I pay for the service of an internet connection, and also I pay with some of the information that people want to pay ME to see in the form of advertisements.
I think capability is more important. If you are the only company that can manufacture a certain kind of nanite, you’re sitting pretty, it doesn’t matter if you hold the patent or not. Besides information is very case specific, and there are plenty of ways to limit access to information without copyright and patent. Lexis Nexis makes a killing off of being information purveyors, and while I am sure they have copyrights of things, their information is protected by their bureaucracy without it.
You can make an argument for copyright protection as far as works that people ‘believe’ they own, but it’s not swaying me a whole lot. They created it, it’s out in the world, it’s nice to throw them a bone once in a while, but you do what you can afford. There is also a system of keeping someone in a particular socio-economic class, where they reduce worker pay to increase shareholder value. Those are two sides of the same coin, and I believe that copyrights are worse for society at present (not past) than they are a boon. Do I feel bad about not paying some of the artists I’ve copied from? Yeah, but I’ve also bought a lot from them as well and brought people into listening to them, so it’s a give and take. The system is shifting and we are all caught in teh balance.
I guess you don’t pay taxes, then. Libraries pay for their books and CDs too, you know. While the absolute number of books and CDs in a library is large, the percentage of all stuff published is small. I love libraries as much as anyone, but I have lots of stuff in my private collection not in our very large library system.
The other difference is that each work in a library (except CDs, perhaps) is a singular item, to be borrowed and returned. If all its books were digital, and were borrowed, and both kept and returned the next day, there would be a big ruckus. If someone could bring a laptop to the library and download a book or movie it would be even worse.
But you seem to be ignoring the fact that people can obtain the information they want for free and legally. They just can’t keep it. Because as the freeloaders like to say: the information belongs to everybody.
There also seems to be a little “The Man is keeping me down” in your posts.
The copyright system may not be perfect, but I like that there’s a system in place that will ensure that I’m compensated for any “information” I create and that I have protections against those that try to “steal” it.
My wife, who works for no big company but sells her work to those who pay her enough, would have a problem with your view of copyright. Copyright is what protects her from said big company ripping off a work published in a small magazine and giving it out with no payment to her. Does that help the little guy? If some company grabbed your art and used it for their advertising campaign extoling the virtues of, say, clubbing baby seals, would that be cool with you?
If you want to give your work away, more power to you, but have some respect for those who don’t or who can’t afford to.