The Copyright Paradox
I was reading a really interesting blog post on copyrights, and this amazing paradox about copyright struck me.
Right now, the internet is changing the way text, music and video are distributed. Part of that change is the ease with which data can be copied. If you look at what the U.S. supreme court said about copyright, they quite literally made an allowance for data to be copied from the hard disk of a computer to the RAM of the computer, mainly because it was necessary for the use of the data. I mean, this is the level at which we are trying to enforce copyright law. If they could find a way to charge extra for you to copy that MP3 file from disk to memory so you could play it, I’m pretty sure they would.
But when I talk about “they”, I’m really talking about some enormous corporation. Copyright infringement is pretty much a civil issue in most cases, and therefore enforcement is left to the copyright holder. And that’s the paradox. We all like to imagine that the struggling solo artist making music in his or her garage is getting screwed because their songs are posted on Kazaa (or whatever), and that by keeping really strong copyright laws we’re somehow helping those kinds of artists. Here’s my revelation: copyright law only helps those that have the (quite considerable) resources to enforce it themselves! So, no matter how strong we make copyright, it doesn’t really help the poor artists — the solo writers, musicians, or filmmakers. Because they’re busy doing what they do best: creating art. If people want to copy their stuff, they will, becuase the internet allows it. Those that love it will buy, those that don’t will pirate it. Copyright is pretty much completely out of the picture, because enforcement is nowhere in sight.
So who does copyright benefit? Well, the huge companies that exist soley to aggregate copyrights. The music labels and maybe the game development houses. Only the entities that have huge sums of money to track down and sue infringers will be able to leverage copyright laws in an attempt to curb piracy. And therein lies the irony: those companies got all that money by skimming off the work of the artists they represent, so the money was lost to those artists anyway.
My conclusion? Copyright really only helps large corporations that exist solely to aggregate copyrights. The artists that it is supposed to reward end up doing best by embracing the sharing the internet affords us, rather than trying to fight it.
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Couldn’t agree more!
I figured I should mention that I found this a couple days ago. Thanks for linking to my SOB entry, It’s not my fault your business model sucks. I found your analysis of the relationship between copyrights and creative industries pretty well spot-on, and shared this with others (including the copyfree mailing list) who I knew would appreciate your take on the matter.
hi there,
thanks for writing this. While i can appreciate your point of view, i can’t say i agree with it. It’s almost an “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” outlook.
I’ve spoken with many ’struggling’ artists who have had their work stolen…and many of them have been successful in having the infringing party remove the work they did not have the permission to use. None of the people i spoke with had to get a lawyer to handle the matter.
Artists pour their heart and soul into their work, and they have every right to own the copyright to it. I would argue that copyright does benefit them.
thanks :)
This article is bull shit.
You’re actually correct that I am espousing a “if you can’t beat them, join them” attitude. But if you take a step back, why do you *want* to “beat” the people that enjoy your work? Sure, some of them might infringe on your copyright, but it would be arrogant to assume that every person on the internet that downloads your work would have ever paid for it, much less known about it, in an age in which the internet did not exist.
What I’m really trying to argue here is that while copyright was handy to prevent rogue publishers from buying books on the day they came out and selling competing copies a few days later, when it comes to digital media, we really owe it to ourselves to be more creative. The web offers this incredible chance to reach an audience of unprecedented size — the main concern is getting people to be interested in the first place given a sea of options.
I really took the CEO of Stardock seriously when he posted about piracy. I mean, it’s great that your friends are musicians and are creating music. It really is. But it sounds like they’re spending a bunch of their time trying to prevent people from pirating their work…time that *could* be spent making more music. And that’s a shame, because I’d guess that they’re not going to see a fraction of the extra sales from fighting piracy that they would from just doing what they do best: being musicians.
In the end, I expect my position will remain that the brilliant people out there making great art shouldn’t redirect their efforts to doing something they probably suck at: fighting people who want to copy their stuff. Maybe it *has* to be this way, and the world in 50 years will *still* have the music industry suing people who shared 12 songs online for millions of dollars. But ya know what? I’m betting not. I’m betting people are going to come up with business models that make good use of the internet and free copying, rather than fighting it. I’d rather be part of the crowd looking forward than the folks clinging to copyright for protection in a time where it offers very little.