Self-Perpetuating Copyright Enforcement

One of the most powerful emotional tricks used by the copyright industry against those seeking to reduce the term and reach of copyright to more rational levels is to invoke the poor starving artists who would suffer if this were to happen.

The fact that the vast majority of creators earn most money soon after producing their work, and relatively little years later, means that taking copyright back to the original 14-year term specified in the Statute of Anne would have minimal effect on them, but it's an undeniably clever pitch.

In reality, the copyright industry couldn't give two hoots about the artists it feeds off, as the following makes clear:

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy previously told TorrentFreak that the ‘damages’ accrued from piracy-related lawsuits will not go to any of the artists, but towards funding more anti-piracy campaigns. “Any funds recouped are re-invested into our ongoing education and anti-piracy programs,” he said.

If the copyright industry *really* cared about the artists, this money would go straight into their deserving pockets.

Moreover, this "re-investment" in anti-piracy programmes makes such actions self-fuelling: the money supposedly gained for those poor starving wretches, is actually used to fund the next action, which funds the next action, and so on.

This means that the copyright organisations have a real incentive to choose a strategy that privileges heavy-handed enforcement over new business models. The latter might result in creators getting paid more, while the former ensures that the fat-cats running the enforcement machine continue to lap up the cream....

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The Peculiar World of Private Label Rights

Here's a variety of "sharing" I'd not come across before: private label rights. This is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject:

Private label rights is a concept similar to reselling, but the merchant is permitted to modify the product to fit his or her needs. Typical PLR products are articles, reports, eBooks, and autoresponders. This kind of content is used for the purpose of allowing multiple buyers to invest in the content with free rein to alter and use it by claiming authorship of it. It is typically used in online affiliate marketing systems.

As far as I can make out, this is a kind of a cross between spamblog content and pyramid selling.

One question that comes to mind is how much CC-licensed stuff ends up being passed around in this way? Of course, if the licence allows it, that's fine, but I wondered whether anyone had any experience of their content being "repackaged" in this way?

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Valleywag Goes Downhill

Sigh.

When I first came across Valleywag's rather narrow-minded attack on Anshe Chung recently, I assumed this was just the kind of editorial misjudgement that happens when publications aim to go beyond the usual pap served up by mainstream titles. As an ex-editor and ex-publisher, I can forgive this kind of thing.

But upon reading this subsequent story, entitled "Virtual world's supposed economy is 'a pyramid scheme'", I'm forced to conclude that Valleywag is simply desperate for attention and thinks that choosing a high-profile victim for its attacks will garner it some traffic (and it's correct, of course: after all, even I'm giving it some).

You can get the gist of the piece from the following:

What you're left with is lots of people putting USD in, and a small group taking those USD out, leaving the rest with no financial claims on anything - just an imaginatively sexy avatar.

Oh, yes, silly me: that's what Second Life's all about, isn't it? Putting money in to get money out. Forget about all that creativity or community stuff: after all, that's just reducible to an "imaginatively sexy avatar", right? (Via Slashdot)

Update: The Man in this sphere has spoken, and all is clear:

It's not a con game. It's a village-sized market. In fact it's a tourist attraction-type village: the big numbers of the people you see are one-time visitors. Newcomers are arriving in droves. Land speculation is rampant. But it's not thick; it's tiny. Not a ponzi scheme: a little mini gold rush.