Justus For All

Copyright in the digital age is something that I, along with I think pretty much everyone else on the internet, has thought quite a bit about.

Today I stumbled upon this post on Techdirt (via Skeptical Optimist) on the economics of abundance along with other posts (listed at the bottom of the linked post) on the same subject. Although I don’t agree with a lot of what was said on those posts, the subject and its presentation posted some thoughts on the matter that I hope will be interesting to others.

First, the concept of subsequent copies of a work being much cheaper to produce then the first copy isn’t new. Indeed, that is the whole reason for copyright in the first place. As an incentive for producing new works, creators are given a ‘new’ form of property: the exclusive right to create copies of it.

Many have claimed that downloading music is not ‘piracy’ because in order for it to be piracy something would have to be stolen, and since the music that is downloaded still exists in its original location, it isn’t piracy. No one lost anything they claim, so how can it be theft. What they fail to understand is that it isn’t the music they are stealing, it is the right to create a copy of that music, that is the ‘property’ that is being stolen.

This isn’t something that is new, or something that has changed with the internet, indeed since the cost of subsequent copies is even cheaper then before, it would seem to me to be more necessary, rather then less as some would argue it.

Obviously though, something is ‘new’ and we can all sense that. I think that a goodly portion of the confusion in this debate is due to many of us not realizing what is new, and understanding the effects that this ‘new’ creation has.

What the internet has changed is not the fact that setting up production, distribution and promotional networks is now dramatically cheaper then it used to be, so dramatically cheaper that it can, for all intents and purposes, be considered ‘free.’ This does indeed change a lot of things. One is that it makes enforcement of copyright dramatically more difficult. Another is that it makes the services that the recording industry provides largely superfluous.

Some argue that the recording industry doesn’t ‘get’ the new digital world. I think that quite to the contrary they do ‘get’ it, and correctly understand that since what they sell (production, distribution and promotion) should be valued at next to nothing they are doing everything in their power to prevent the evolution of this brave new world. Since of course no one is particularly interested in making sure the record companies maintain their monopoly, they try to focus attention on the need to maintain copyright enforcement and leverage that into maintaining a monopoly on production and distribution. In this they are usually abetted by their opponents, who also attack copyright rather then trying to promote alternate distribution methods while maintaining copyright.

It is certainly true that maintaining an enforcement on copyright when production and distribution costs are nearly free is a difficult proposition. It is made more difficult when copyright has been expanded, both in time and in scope beyond what it probably should be, eroding support for the very concept. That being said, I think we would be very foolish to abandon this artificial right altogether. It does, as it was always intended, provide an incentive to create that otherwise would not be there.

Many of the specific DRM solutions that have been promoted are indeed flawed. Generally speaking, only those who want to eliminate copyright or those who what to maintain a monopoly on production and distribution networks have contributed to this debate. Creating a solution that is between those two extremes will doubtless be difficult, and I certainly don’t have any quick answers. Hopefully though a better understanding of where the real difficulties lie will aid in this search.