Consumers vs. IP Owners: The Future of Copyright

conJunk writes "The BBC has a thoughtful article about new challenges in copyright. The problem: The rights to the audio recordings of the Beatles first album will expire in 2013. While consumers stand to benefit from competing releases of the materials, the copyright owners are of course terrified. And the artists? This one doesn't even seem to affect them."

Comments

Whats the problem?

[AuMatar]

Thats the entire point of copyright- a limited monopoly in exchange for greater incentive to produce. It is expected to eventually run out. The problem here isn't that its going to run out, the problem is that its been over 40 years and it hasn't run out already!

Re:Whats the problem?

[ackthpt]

Thats the entire point of copyright- a limited monopoly in exchange for greater incentive to produce.

But it's not an incentive to produce. Prior to copyright law content creators had to keep creating to feed themselves, whereas the system we have now says, "Create a winner, milk it for the rest of your life."

Re:Whats the problem?

[EvanED]

I think a 2 or 3 year copyright is rediculously short.

If I could freely get any song or movie (and you can be sure that people would post online mirrors of DVDs and CDs) in just 3 years, I don't know if I'd every buy another one during the time of protection.

The situation with software is different because there are (sometimes) actual productivity gains from newer versions. But you can bet that I wouldn't buy the latest copy of Visual Studio unless I was doing something in C# that needed generics (2003 works well enough), wouldn't buy Office, wouldn't buy Photoshop (not that I have it now), etc. With a 2-3 year span, that's barely the release cycle. You think you see compatibility problems now? Wait until software companies REALLY have to force you to upgrade.

I *really* don't think I'm in the minority here. I'm perhaps a bit more patient than some would be with regards to the movies and music, but stuff that's more than 3 years old are still big movers in stores.

The original copyright term was 14 yr, renewable once. I personally think that this is about as short as you should get, and I like the idea of protection for the life of the author or an equivalent term for companies.

Re:Whats the problem?

[cpt kangarooski]

No, not really. It's a bit short, but not ridiculously so.

Most creative works have no copyright-related economic value at all. Slashdot posts fall into this category; no one is publishing compilations of their best posts and selling them because they'd never make money at it.

Of the small fraction of works that have such value, the value usually is front-loaded. That is, the vast majority of all the value the work will ever have is realizable right away. For example, a movie makes most of the money it will ever make from theatrical releases on opening weekend. When it hits pay-per-view, it again makes most of its money on the first weekend. Ditto for when it becomes available to rent or buy. The amount of money that can be extracted later on typically declines, and is pretty small compared to the initial amount. We're talking about 70-90% up front, you see.

Of course there are exceptions, but remember that they are tremendously rare. It is foolish to design copyright policy around aberrations. For an author to make a work like that is on par with winning the lottery. They would make a lot of money even with short terms. We don't need to help them. Rather, help should be tailored around the needs of more common artists. After all, copyright is a subsidy in the form of a monopoly on commodity goods and it's just dumb to give subsidies to the people that need them the least.

Some studies have been done as to the economic life expectancy of works. IIRC, the number tends to be 10-20 years. For some works, such as software, I can easily imagine the number being a lot shorter.

Life terms are totally unacceptable. They make the system unpredictable: author A could have a copyright that lasts fifty years, and author B could have a copyright that lasts one. Adding yet more time doesn't help. And as already noted, the economic worth to authors is usually minimal. The CTEA extension was valued on average at about a nickel, IIRC, and that was 20 years more. Better to have a fixed length term (or better still, to make it granular with many short terms that need to be renewed) so that artists know that there is a time limit, and the public can anticipate the regular release of works into the public domain and act accordingly. (E.g. you can run a business when you know that you can reprint a book in 20 years, but you can't when it could be any damn time in the future)

Long copyrights do not help provide for artists in their old age, or for their families, except in the rare cases mentioned above (in which case it is almost certain that the author already got a lot of money). This is because old copyrights are usually not valuable. If artists want to be secure in the future, they should rely on the same things everyone else relies on: savings, investments, pensions, social security, life insurance, etc. Not only is it more fair, but artists have far, far better odds of being better off with these things than betting that their book will still sell very well decades in the future and against all odds.

Long copyrights as a widows and orphans fund is as irresponsible as giving them scratch off lottery tickets would be. The only people who do tend to come out well are the ones that got rich right at the beginning, and they don't really need our help to become much more rich, do they? They're not going to be struggling in their old age, unless they're crazy irresponsible, right? Why are we treating them specially then?

It's essential that this happen.

[Overneath42]

Limited copyright is an essential element to maintaining a consistent creative human spirit. By allowing works to be protected for a limited amount of time, the artist can comfortably turn some profit on their creation. But by allowing that protection to lapse, another creator can pick up the work of the original artist and manipulate it, turning it into something different. The whole of human creativity depends on building upon the works of others.

It's pretty frightening to think about the incredible lengths that IP holders are going to these days to increase the length of copyright ever further, all in the name of limited, short-term profits. They represent an immeasurable threat. Think about it: if copyright never expired, where would the motivation to innovate come from? There would be none, if you could indefinitely profit from one or two ideas.

Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig has some very enlightened analysis on this subject.