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Copyright Law for the Future: Control & Creativity
ablair writes: "MacSurfer is linking to a truly excellent article by Stanford Law's Lawrence Lessig, on the copyright balance between Control & Creativity. A must-read for those interested in everything from the RIAA-mp3 battles to the way GPL & BSD Licenses should be."
I don't think so. I believe that purely voluntary, uncoerced payment could not only be adequate, but better for both the users and producers of information products. Traditionally, publishers and retailers took the lion's share of income, so considerably smaller revenue will mean equal or greater profit for the creator. In other words, if you don't make the creators force you to pay them, you can pay them a lot less and they'll be just as well-rewarded and encouraged to make more good stuff.
I do believe that it has to become easier and more efficient, which is why I've worked on a system for more efficient donations. Processing donations is a lot easier than processing verified, mandatory payments, and the issues that kill a micropayment system aren't really a problem for a microdonation system. With an open system like this, you can implement the allocation process in all sorts of interesting ways, such as integration with what you choose to view, or to file for repeat viewing. Convenience is absolutely key, and crufty web services like Amazon Honor System are just not going to cut it for allocating a dozen nickels and pennies per hour.
However, it would be irresponsible to drop copyright before this concept is proven on the market. It can be tested perfectly well without changing copyright law. The competitive advantage of a free (gratis) product is obvious, and if people will pay, free products will displace products with a mandatory cost. If they pay more for free (libre) products, then these will be the best strategy for profit-seeking developers.
Eventually, copyright would just seem pointless. But this can only happen when the users take responsibility for rewarding good products.
Broke college students and an entire culture raised on broadcast radio, tv and the premise that media and entertainment is free.
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Think about this example - think back to the days where a personal cd player cost around $150, sucked batteries etc, etc. Think of what the CD industry was before Columbia House (and scamming their ass hard). It sucked, virtually nobody had cds - why? well, because the ability to play awesome quality music / not have to ff, etc, etc wasn't worth the cost.
I have no idea how the entertainment industry can think that their attempts at DRM, etc can compete with "free" or at the very least "cheap alternative" sources like the radio or the cds burned by polly the pirate. You can't change the mindset of people who were raised to turn on the tv / radio and tune to whatever station and get a program without any hastle.
The cat is out of the bag, more people use the "illegal" services than use the legal - hell - if you use a commercial DRM supporting player - i.e. rio 600 - there is actually value lost - the interface is a fucking pain compared to how i get files to my rio volt (cd mp3 player). Not that diamond could ever make software worth a damn anyways (hw kicks ass), but still . .
Now the video industry has something that actually might save their ass - DVD special features, the fact that data speeds over the net are slow and the lack of a comercial player for DIVX on your TV - which are the only things that are preventing DIVX from being in almost every household.
Quality sure as hell isn't stopping people - the new 4.12 divx codec looks damn near dvd quality at full screen if postprocessing is set to max (needs a good box tho, about 1 GHz, damn).
What can I say, this isn't a financial war they are fighting, but one against a mindset, and they are approaching it the wrong way.
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I think Lessig is trying to apply prior situations to current situations in a way that will not work at all. When talking about cable TV or the player piano rolls, Congress had the ability to restrict use or distribution of these products without too much difficulty. Also, both cable and piano rolls required resources to produce and distribute.
P2P sharing is a completely different idea though, in the digital world, it becomes much harder to track distribution of products, and much easier to distribute, thus making it much harder for Congress to regulate P2P. If one tried to force a P2P service to pay those industries whose products it distributes, how would one keep track of all the media and account for it with the volume that goes over each network, or even the bigger problem, how would a service stay in business when it has to pay for transactions when there will most likely be other services out there which will not comply for various reasons. It's not possible for Congress to simply legislate on the internet, any legislation enacted in the spirit which Lessig is talking about would require a complete overhaul of how we interact with the internet in some way, most likely infringing on free speech as well.
As every type of media becomes digital and easily able to be distributed, its not possible for Congress to deal with digital mediums as it did with player pianos. I'm afraid that this is one situation where we are going to have actually tread new ground instead of relying on previous cases. I'm not sure exactly how we should legislate internet distribution, or even if we should, but I know that any effective or meaningfull legislation won't be based on any previous copyright ideas.
This article should be required reading for anybody interested in intellectual property. No black-and-white stuff here. But the people who most need to read it, and the ones that I sincerely hope will, are the seven old men and two old women who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
when they are either followed or capable of being enforced.
The internet is a medium where we can vote a referendum without going to the polls. No matter what the courts or congress decide, music will be shared. Napster may be dead, but we now have Gnutella.
I just realized something. You always hear that you need to "do something about it," implying voting or writing your congressman about an issue. We need to "speak up." Well, it occurred to me that we are saying something, we're lobbying in our own way All the millions of people out there sharing information freely are saying "I believe this should be available to me, in this format, at this price." We just aren't talking in the way congress, the government, and the industry wants to listen to.
This was a good piece, although shorter versions of it can be found at many places.
Content creators have it tough in this time. They are told to make money off their content, but the content sellers (time/warner, random house, etc) will help you do that only if you the content creator agree to the terms for selling content. The author has little flexibility in negotiating with the content provider if they want to make a profit.
In the early 1990's I felt that intellectual endeavors had zero economic value. I was not disparaging the pursuit of wealth or even making a cynical comment about the publishing market (I was an unpublished writer). I was merely stating what I felt to be an obvious point. The market cannot properly assess the value of artistic objects. My creative writing was (I felt) terrific, and yet no publisher would take a chance. And why would they? They had a bottom line to worry about, and I was not so naive to believe that any of my creative works would be a cash cow for a publishing company.
5 years later, the Internet was upon us, and suddenly, I no longer had to worry about getting published. Everybody and their 15 year old brother could publish a decent web page. It was a glorious time, but it threatened the livelihood of content creators (who probably weren't making a lot of dough off selling content anyway).
For me, nothing had changed. My goal was widespread distribution. Since I could accomplish that without begging a publisher to back me, I no longer needed publishers anymore. And nothing really had changed because I operated under the assumption that no economic value was to be gained from writing fiction to begin with.
Even though many artists/intellectuals are resigned to their output having no commercial value, most people still like the idea of buying the book at the bookstore or renting the video. Time Warner/Blockbuster/Random House are content facilitators. They provide easy access to art in a medium we prefer. In other words, TW/Blockbuster is offering a convenience service, not content. For that reason, content providers should not have the ability to restrict content in order to offer us the convenience of providing it for a price.
Of course, maybe what I say doesn't apply so much to the movie world, with lavish budgets and special effects. But then again, perhaps the big studio film came about only because of the aggregation of power of the Hollywood film industry. And remember, individuals now can produce special effects comparable to what studios coudl do 10 or 20 years ago.
Perhaps it is idealistic to believe that content creators should offer their content for free. After all, they have to buy their videocams, their PC's and their hosting service. And a lucky few find it immensely rewarding, so obviously they would want corporate backing. But at the moment, there are few advantages for content creators to hand over rights to a convenience/distribution service like Time/Warner/AOL. Profits are puny, and the restrictions on access are contrary to the artist's hope. One example concerns my friend's newspaper articles. His newspaper refuses him access to his own articles. And his articles remain in this database, totally inaccessible except for those willing to pay a fee to access it.
Free and commercial content have coexisted and will continue to do so. Even though we may complain about the strictness with which content providers guard the content they have bought, at least distribution companies are helping to make artistic works available (at a price) to the general public. There are thousands of music bands out there that nobody has ever heard of; MTV and Time/Warner have the power to provide the infrastructure and the publicity and distribution. Perhaps that is unnecessary, but without content providers like this, would we lose the common cultural heritage that makes us a culture?
Robert Nagle, idiotprogrammer Austin TX
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I propose that copyright should be 50 years or life + 25 years. This would be whichever is longest.
I've already mentioned this perviously in this topic, so I'll mention why it works.
Reasonable profitable lifetime of a work: If Peter Jackson dies after winning the oscars, his defacto wife gets royalties for Lord of The Rings for 50 years.
That's long enough for her to live on and bring up children. Life + 25 would mean royalties for LoTR film 2 and film 3 would be active for just 24 & 23 years.
However if he lives to be 'eleventy one' then he effectively has 60 years in his lifetime plus 25 for the children to profit.
This is a very fair system for young authors and their families, stars like Elvis or Buddy Holly would be going into public domain now.
The point is, a 20 year limit wouldn't work even with software. Look at 30 year old Unix:
Unix is still considered a valuable collection of works even though everyone can afford supercomputers now.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer