Another Problem with Copyright; How to Fix It

Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will be well aware of some of the key problems with copyright in the Internet age. For example, the desire to stop people sharing unauthorised digital files online has led to more and more extreme legislation, culminating in the recent ACTA and TPP. In fact, it is impossible to stop people sharing such files unless you institute total surveillance to check on everything that is uploaded and downloaded. By an interesting coincidence, that is precisely where we are heading thanks to legislation like the Draft Communications Data Bill...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Isn't It Time Artists Lost Their 18th-Century Sense Of Entitlement?

One of the common assumptions in the copyright debate is that artists are special, and that they have a right to make money from their works repeatedly, in ways not granted to "ordinary" workers like plumbers or train drivers, thanks to copyright's reach through time and space. Of course, when modern copyright was devised in the early 18th century, artists were special in the sense they were scarce; offering them special monopoly privileges "for the encouragement of learning" as the 1710 Statute of Anne puts it, therefore made sense. 

On Techdirt.

The Struggle Between Copyright and the Internet

January 18, 2012 may well go down as a pivotal date in the history of the Internet – and of copyright.  For on that day, the English-language Wikipedia and thousands of other websites were blacked out or modified to protest against two bills passing through the US legislative system that were designed to fight copyright infringement.  To understand why that unprecedented action took place, and what it means for the future of the Net, it’s necessary to review the history of copyright briefly. 

On Stir to Action.

Revolutions

On the first LP I ever owned was Tchaikovsky's Serenade, Ravel's Bolero and Smetana's "Bartered Bride" Overture. It was soon joined by many more vinyl discs, but the problem of storing these 12" leviathans soon became a limiting factor. Things grew rapidly worse when I discovered the wonderful if even bulkier Vox Boxes, with their irresistible promise of "complete X", where X might be Bach flute sonatas or Mozart piano variations.

Fortunately, as the floor of my flat was in serious danger of ceding under the weight of hundreds of boxes and LPs, the CD came along. For reasons that escape me, my first CD was Virgil Thomson's "The Plow that broke the Plains", but this was soon joined by hundreds and then thousands of others.

Once again storage - and organisation - became a crucial issue, and once again, I was saved by technology, this time in the shape of the MP3 file. I bought one of the earliest MP3 players, the Diamond RIO PMP300. This came with a massive 32Mbytes of RAM, allowing up to an hour of listening (albeit at lower quality).

It was an important moment not just for me, but also for the industry, as Wikipedia explains:

On October 8, 1998, the American recording industry group, the Recording Industry Association of America, filed an application for a Temporary Restraining Order to prevent the sale of the Rio player in the Central District Court of California, claiming the player violated the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act.

Judge Andrea Collins issued the temporary order on October 16, but required the RIAA to post a $500,000 bond that would be used to compensate Diamond for damages incurred in the delay if Diamond eventually prevailed in court. Diamond then announced that it would temporarily delay shipment of the Rio.

On October 26, Judge Collins denied the RIAA's application. After the lawsuit ended, Diamond sold 200,000 players.

This was one of the earliest attempts by the RIAA to derail the future of music, and luckily on this occasion it lost.

Of course, once music became digital, Moore's Law ensured that things kept on scaling. Silicon storage capacities went up, and prices went down, until today I have dozens of Gbytes of MP3 files of music stored on various media.

And yet I rarely listen to them, because streaming in the shape of Spotify came along a couple of years ago. Although I understand the issues about not owning the music you listen to, I'm lucky enough to have vast amounts of the music that is most important to me available in multiple backup formats - LPs, CDs and MP3s. If Spotify disappears tomorrow - say, as a result of being destroyed by a patent troll - I can just go back to listening to these. In addition, I feel increasingly guilty about owning anything in a depleted world drowning in stuff, so streaming seems like a good idea anyway.

It's of course regrettable that Spotify isn't open source, but it has certainly taken my experience of listening to music to a new level. The ability to leave the complete works of Mozart, say, running in the background for days, or to hear the same movement of a Beethoven symphony played by 35 different orchestras has never been so easy; both change how you regard well-loved pieces because they provide new contexts that allow you to listen to them more deeply.

Moreover, Spotify gives me the unprecedented capability of listening to something - now matter how obscure (well, almost) - the moment I come across even the merest reference to it. It really is like having practically all music instantly on tap, anywhere there is an Internet connection.

As such, it's a foretaste of how things will soon be for all digital artefacts, when every text, image, sound and video ever created will be just as instantly and effortlessly available. The only thing standing between us and that amazing, mind-expanding world of digital abundance is an 18th-century law that replaced earlier censorship with a framework for the "encouragement of learning" in an age of analogue scarcity. Once anachronistic copyright has been abolished, my journey from LPs through CDs and MP3s will be complete, and the ultimate knowledge revolution can begin.

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Copyright as a Metaphor for "Rip-off"

There's a piece on C|net which I can only hope was written with the express intent of provoking a reaction, since it's basic idea is so batty:

A European court last month agreed with a group of regional publishers in Belgium that accused Google of ripping off their content. The court ordered Google to remove text summaries of the newspapers' articles, along with Web links to the publishers' sites.

As world and dog have pointed out, what Google News does is provide free - yes, free - publicity for news sites, leading to free - yes, free - extra traffic, which can then be converted to what we in the trade call dosh. The idea that Google is somehow "ripping off" the poor old media conglomerates is risible. But luckily, they seem intent on slitting their own throats, so let 'em, says I.

More serious is the implicit assumption in the C|net piece that there is something sacred about copyrighted material. Maybe there would be, if copyright did what it was originally intended to do: to provide an incentive to the creator to create. But now that copyright typically runs for 50 or even 70 years after the creator's death, it's hard to see how new works are going to be conjured up except with a Ouija board.

Copyright has broken the original social compact, which is that people aren't allowed to copy it for 14 years - yes, 14 - in return for being allowed to do what they like with it afterwards. As copyright is extended time and time again, it is becoming impossible ever to access the content it covers: there is no quid for the quo.

So copyright has become the "rip-off", demanding without giving. If media companies really wanted to stop people using their materials, they should go back to a balanced copyright that gave to both parties. The current system is so inequitable that it is no wonder most people feel morally justified in ignoring it.