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100 Years of Copyright Hysteria
Nate Anderson pens a fine historical retrospective for Ars Technica: a look at 100 years of Big Content's fearmongering, in their own words. There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music ("What of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"). There was the photocopier after World War II. There was the VCR in the 1970s, which a movie lobbyist predicted would result in tidal waves, avalanches, and bleeding and hemorrhaging by the music business. He compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler — in this scenario the US public was a woman home alone. Then home taping of music, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and Napster, each of which was predicted to lay waste to entire industries; and so on up to date with DVRs, HD radio, and HDTV. Anderson concludes with a quote from copyright expert William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.
If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.
They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.
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Here's what Thomas Jefferson (found of the democratic party) and James Madison (author of the Constitution) said about it:
"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
"Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Madison -
"But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good." Sounds like Mr. Madison was talking about RIAA.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
I think copyright, and IP law in general has a legitimate and defensible purpose. That said, IP policy is essentially made without any regard to facts (you could argue that about a lot of policy, but in IP it's particularly bad). The fact that one can violate copyright law so easily, without intending it, and the fact that so much stuff of so little value is copyrighted, as well as really old stuff, breeds contempt of copyright law altogether.
The legitimacy of copyright law might be salvaged by cutting down the length of terms drastically, or otherwise changing the policy so that it is actually sensible. Barring that, though, as long as some written works from 1924 are still copyrighted, can you really blame people for thinking the whole thing is ridiculous?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
One of the underlying questions is: with the millions of hours of music we already made, what benefit does it bring us to have even more music?
If you're a 80's music fan, then you already have everything you need ;-)
see a Text Widget
"Without copyright how... do you think movies, music, games and software are going to remain viable endeavours?"
The answer is: the same way they did before and are doing now. "Piracy" is at its highest, if statistics are to be believed, but so are profits of all the above - in fact the proportions are greatly in favour of vastly *more* money being made now even with higher piracy. Movies, music, games, software = multi-billion dollar industries. One of the top-40 hits in the UK at the moment is by someone who sang along to YouTube vids. *With* copyright enforcement, she would be nothing now (and probably owe several thousand pounds of licensing fees), and we'd be at least one artist down. She's not the first and won't be the last. Most musicians give away or sell their music every day without a problem. It's only the "big" ones that do so for enormous profit and are *actually* represented by these organisations.
I have a friend who is in a relationship with a professional rapper. They don't make much money but they make enough. And all their music is just sitting on Myspace. It's got a Paypal button to let you buy a CD, but their stuff is original, good and given away on YouTube, MySpace and other sites. I don't think they've suffered under the current rates of piracy - I think they'd be nowhere without the exposure that giving their music away brings them.
It works both ways and it is, basically, an artform, not a business. It's like saying "without blue paint, how can artists thrive?!"... they did, for thousands of years, and still do and still would if all the blue paint disappeared. We didn't need blue-paint rationing, or companies telling us that blue paint is the express domain of artists, etc. Copyright is merely a tool to commercialise an artform. There are many ways of doing that, including just giving the damn things away to build a reputation to later release a real piece of art for huge profit.
And, unfortunately, copyright works both ways. If I want fair-use snippets, if I want to license them, if I want to do other things, there's no reason to stop me or make it prohibitively expensive - it's poor business. Ever tried to do this "officially"? Try and ask permission from a record company to use a song on a YouTube vid, or in a school play - see what assurances and what pricing structure they want to give you (I have, in the past, been quoted "per viewer" figures!). It's nothing to do with business, it's about controlling the media so that they can *tell* you what to buy next week (i.e. their next "up-and-coming" artist).
Copyright is already seriously lessened. Children are taught by otherwise-educated teachers to just "paste in something from Google images" which is a potential breach of so many copyrights in an hour's lesson that it's unbelievable. School plays are run off someone's iPod where they've downloaded relevant music and video. Kids share videos, music, ringtones, applications, etc. indiscriminately. It's already a lost cause unless you want to start criminalising everyone from toddlers to grannies. Give it a few decades and it will swing one way or another - you won't be able to make a piece of music without "enforcing" everything to do with it, or you won't be able to sell a piece of music at all. Both are absolutely terrible circumstances, but because of naive business practices, the artform is dying.
I should feel sorry for the smaller artists, for whom copyright is designed to help thrive, but in actual fact they are doing quite well enough on their own and will probably be the winners in the end. I think they've got the tech that replaces the need for the legislation now, so I wish them well. Music, especially, is part of life now. There were several decades of being able to commercialise that and almost every country in the world decided it was better to penalise that instead. Hence, the position now is that people really don't care any more. I don't know anyone who bought *every* song on their iPod.
I've bought t