I submit that the most siginficant aspect of this story is that it demonstrates now the artificial market interference of the "anti-piracy" enforcers is already being used to arbitrarily restrict user freedoms in areas that are only incidentally related to the purpose of copyrights.
This kind of rippling ramification will become ever more common as the legacy duplication and distribution industries get ever more desperate in protecting their obsolote business model from technological progress.
The core objectives of copyrights and patents are essentially the same - to encourage creativity and benefit the public good. Creativity is encouraged by allowing the creator a monopoly right to exploit his work product for long enough to extract fair value. In return for this limited period of protection, the creator's work becomes public domain.
It was specifically the expected benefit to the public good of timely transfer to the public domain of technical knowledge and creative works that justified the distortion of even a limited duration monopoly within a free market economy. So the overt intention of patents and copyrights has always been the eventual transfer to public domain. The only question has been the duration of protected monopoly needed to extract fair value compensation before the copyrighted work becomes public domain.
In 1776 copyright protection was set at 14 years. It's only been in the last few decades that copyrights have been extended from a few years to somewhere around four generations beyond the lifetime of the creator - essentially a perpetual special privilege. The current period is an extreme aberration in copyright history - at least during the period when copyrights bothered to mention the rights of the creator at all. (The original and continuing primary purpose of copyrights has been to protect the "rights" of "reproducers".) It is also an extreme violation of the public interest since it delays transfer to the public domain beyond the useful value of many/most works.
Returning to the original purpose of copyrights, the legitimate duration of monopoly protection is a function of the time required to monetize the creative work sufficiently to return fair value to the creator. Once the creator has obtained fair value, there is no further justification for monopoly protection.
In the current business model, most artists receive their only compensation as an advance. The record labels routinely demand that creators sign over all rights to the resulting recordings. So the current extended copyrights don't protect the rights of creators in the first place - they protect the monopoly production rights of those selling copies of copyrighted works. The legacy record labels have lobbied for repeated extensions to copyright protection on the basis that ever longer monopolies were needed to compensate for the high costs of capital intensive manufacturing and distribution.
Eliminate the high costs of the legacy record labels and you eliminate the need for extracting vast wealth from the music trade. Creators can be better compensated for their contributions to the popular culture, while the costs to consumers can drop to a level reflecting the true cost of digital production and distribution.
What is really needed is for enough people to see past the efforts of the legacy record labels to artificially preserve the limitations of obsolete technologies, and allow the free market to implement the legitimate purposes of copyrights in more efficient ways.
The current authoritarian tactics are an obvious failure, and are causing substantial collateral damage to innocent victims of miss-targeted enforcement efforts. The solution isn't more of the same, but rather to accommodate human nature and evolving technology.
The only reason why P2P file sharing is a problem is because copyrights have been extended into perpetual special privileges. Copyrights were only needed in the first place due to the limitations of physical media and the brick and mortar distribution system. Both of those are now obsolete - as are the artificial market distortions justified by their limitations.
Just as the Internet offers a far more efficient distribution system, it also offers the ability to shorten the time require for a creator to recover fair value for his work before releasing (some) rights to the public domain. A modified dutch auction over the Internet provides the means for artists to be fully compensated at the moment they finish their creation. Once the artist has received fair value for a recorded performance, there isn't any need to attempt to control how consumers choose to use that recording. The P2P file sharing that today is called piracy, and used to justify ever more abusive intrusions into the rights of all people in order to enforce unnecessary copyright restrictions, becomes highly valuable viral promotion and distribution that benefits the artist.
Remember that the artist has already been cut of meaningful earnings from the reproduction and sale of recordings by the typical "all rights" contract terms imposed by the legacy record labels. Only a tiny percentage of artists earn a living from royalties on their recordings. For most artists, the primary benefit of selling records is just the publicity - they still make most of their money from live performances. File sharing and "word of mouth" on the Internet are much more effective promotion than the paid advertising of the legacy labels.
This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of the controversy. It really is about a major change in the technology base of the existing industry.
The legacy music publishing industry is an artifact of the limitations of the manufacturing of physical media, and the brick and mortar distribution system required to supply music on physical media to consumers.
They've exploited their control over the capital intensive means of production and distribution to the point where they have largely lost sight of the core purpose of the "music industry" - which is to efficiently facilitate the exchange of value between creators and consumers.
A reasonable case can be made that the legacy recording industry has distorted its consolidated control over access to the established retail music channels to such a degree that they've largely displaced the creators as the primary purpose and beneficiaries of the creation and consumption of music.
This level of market distortion is a common symptom of end stage obsolescence. The end-stage horse-drawn buggy makers also tried to obstruct their replacement by automobiles by arbitrarily prohibiting the advantages of their competition. One of their attempts to hobble the real world advantages of automobiles was to lobby for regulations requiring a man to walk in front of a car with a warning flag during daylight and a lantern at night. This regulation - that was still on the books in some states decades later - would have effectively limited automobiles to slower speeds than horse-drawn buggies. What an unfortunate "side effect" of protecting the public from the dangers of these new fangled contraptions!
Unfortunately, the obsolete legacy recording industry still has a dangerous amount of political influence, and is aggressively using it to protect its ability to control a marketplace that is trying to escape from its control. The vast majority of the "problems" are the result of the efforts by the legacy recording industry to preserve their legacy ability to dominate and control the recorded music market.
The legacy recording labels inherited their business model from printers. The concept of copyrights started out as constraint of trade agreements within a cartel of printers allocating the rights to print specific books among its members. The rights of authors weren't even considered. When the rights of authors were eventually included in copyright statutes, the printers solved this minor complication by requiring authors sign over all rights to their works to the printers as a condition for access to the printer-controlled means of publication and distribution of books.
The core justification for modern copyrights was to transfer creative works to the public domain. Copyrights were intended to provide a limited duration monopoly right to exploit creative works in order to compensate the creator and thereby encourage the production of creative works.
The core purpose of transferring creative works to the public domain after the creator receives fair value compensation, has been largely subverted by those who controlled the increasingly obsolete capital intensive means of production and distribution. The period of copyright protected monopolies have been extended to the point where they have become essentially perpetual - converting a limited duration market abuse into a permanent special privilege.
Music piracy today has a lot of similarities with legitimate uses of public domain content - except that the scope and duration of copyrights have been extended far beyond their original intended limits.
One of the primary functions of free markets is to create alternatives to inefficient industries. The inherent costs and constraints of the traditional recording industry have created strong incentives for the market to find better alternatives. The legacy recording industry is attempting to frustrate the natural functions of a free market in order to preserve its ability to abuse that market.
Slashdot Mirror
I submit that the most siginficant aspect of this story is that it demonstrates now the artificial market interference of the "anti-piracy" enforcers is already being used to arbitrarily restrict user freedoms in areas that are only incidentally related to the purpose of copyrights.
This kind of rippling ramification will become ever more common as the legacy duplication and distribution industries get ever more desperate in protecting their obsolote business model from technological progress.
The core objectives of copyrights and patents are essentially the same - to encourage creativity and benefit the public good. Creativity is encouraged by allowing the creator a monopoly right to exploit his work product for long enough to extract fair value. In return for this limited period of protection, the creator's work becomes public domain.
It was specifically the expected benefit to the public good of timely transfer to the public domain of technical knowledge and creative works that justified the distortion of even a limited duration monopoly within a free market economy. So the overt intention of patents and copyrights has always been the eventual transfer to public domain. The only question has been the duration of protected monopoly needed to extract fair value compensation before the copyrighted work becomes public domain.
In 1776 copyright protection was set at 14 years. It's only been in the last few decades that copyrights have been extended from a few years to somewhere around four generations beyond the lifetime of the creator - essentially a perpetual special privilege. The current period is an extreme aberration in copyright history - at least during the period when copyrights bothered to mention the rights of the creator at all. (The original and continuing primary purpose of copyrights has been to protect the "rights" of "reproducers".) It is also an extreme violation of the public interest since it delays transfer to the public domain beyond the useful value of many/most works.
Returning to the original purpose of copyrights, the legitimate duration of monopoly protection is a function of the time required to monetize the creative work sufficiently to return fair value to the creator. Once the creator has obtained fair value, there is no further justification for monopoly protection.
In the current business model, most artists receive their only compensation as an advance. The record labels routinely demand that creators sign over all rights to the resulting recordings. So the current extended copyrights don't protect the rights of creators in the first place - they protect the monopoly production rights of those selling copies of copyrighted works. The legacy record labels have lobbied for repeated extensions to copyright protection on the basis that ever longer monopolies were needed to compensate for the high costs of capital intensive manufacturing and distribution.
Eliminate the high costs of the legacy record labels and you eliminate the need for extracting vast wealth from the music trade. Creators can be better compensated for their contributions to the popular culture, while the costs to consumers can drop to a level reflecting the true cost of digital production and distribution.
What is really needed is for enough people to see past the efforts of the legacy record labels to artificially preserve the limitations of obsolete technologies, and allow the free market to implement the legitimate purposes of copyrights in more efficient ways.
The current authoritarian tactics are an obvious failure, and are causing substantial collateral damage to innocent victims of miss-targeted enforcement efforts. The solution isn't more of the same, but rather to accommodate human nature and evolving technology.
The only reason why P2P file sharing is a problem is because copyrights have been extended into perpetual special privileges. Copyrights were only needed in the first place due to the limitations of physical media and the brick and mortar distribution system. Both of those are now obsolete - as are the artificial market distortions justified by their limitations.
Just as the Internet offers a far more efficient distribution system, it also offers the ability to shorten the time require for a creator to recover fair value for his work before releasing (some) rights to the public domain. A modified dutch auction over the Internet provides the means for artists to be fully compensated at the moment they finish their creation. Once the artist has received fair value for a recorded performance, there isn't any need to attempt to control how consumers choose to use that recording. The P2P file sharing that today is called piracy, and used to justify ever more abusive intrusions into the rights of all people in order to enforce unnecessary copyright restrictions, becomes highly valuable viral promotion and distribution that benefits the artist.
Remember that the artist has already been cut of meaningful earnings from the reproduction and sale of recordings by the typical "all rights" contract terms imposed by the legacy record labels. Only a tiny percentage of artists earn a living from royalties on their recordings. For most artists, the primary benefit of selling records is just the publicity - they still make most of their money from live performances. File sharing and "word of mouth" on the Internet are much more effective promotion than the paid advertising of the legacy labels.
This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of the controversy. It really is about a major change in the technology base of the existing industry.
The legacy music publishing industry is an artifact of the limitations of the manufacturing of physical media, and the brick and mortar distribution system required to supply music on physical media to consumers.
They've exploited their control over the capital intensive means of production and distribution to the point where they have largely lost sight of the core purpose of the "music industry" - which is to efficiently facilitate the exchange of value between creators and consumers.
A reasonable case can be made that the legacy recording industry has distorted its consolidated control over access to the established retail music channels to such a degree that they've largely displaced the creators as the primary purpose and beneficiaries of the creation and consumption of music.
This level of market distortion is a common symptom of end stage obsolescence. The end-stage horse-drawn buggy makers also tried to obstruct their replacement by automobiles by arbitrarily prohibiting the advantages of their competition. One of their attempts to hobble the real world advantages of automobiles was to lobby for regulations requiring a man to walk in front of a car with a warning flag during daylight and a lantern at night. This regulation - that was still on the books in some states decades later - would have effectively limited automobiles to slower speeds than horse-drawn buggies. What an unfortunate "side effect" of protecting the public from the dangers of these new fangled contraptions!
Unfortunately, the obsolete legacy recording industry still has a dangerous amount of political influence, and is aggressively using it to protect its ability to control a marketplace that is trying to escape from its control. The vast majority of the "problems" are the result of the efforts by the legacy recording industry to preserve their legacy ability to dominate and control the recorded music market.
The legacy recording labels inherited their business model from printers. The concept of copyrights started out as constraint of trade agreements within a cartel of printers allocating the rights to print specific books among its members. The rights of authors weren't even considered. When the rights of authors were eventually included in copyright statutes, the printers solved this minor complication by requiring authors sign over all rights to their works to the printers as a condition for access to the printer-controlled means of publication and distribution of books.
The core justification for modern copyrights was to transfer creative works to the public domain. Copyrights were intended to provide a limited duration monopoly right to exploit creative works in order to compensate the creator and thereby encourage the production of creative works.
The core purpose of transferring creative works to the public domain after the creator receives fair value compensation, has been largely subverted by those who controlled the increasingly obsolete capital intensive means of production and distribution. The period of copyright protected monopolies have been extended to the point where they have become essentially perpetual - converting a limited duration market abuse into a permanent special privilege.
Music piracy today has a lot of similarities with legitimate uses of public domain content - except that the scope and duration of copyrights have been extended far beyond their original intended limits.
One of the primary functions of free markets is to create alternatives to inefficient industries. The inherent costs and constraints of the traditional recording industry have created strong incentives for the market to find better alternatives. The legacy recording industry is attempting to frustrate the natural functions of a free market in order to preserve its ability to abuse that market.
A workable solutio