I like this statement. This summarizes a decent portion of the anger generated by the RIAA, the MPAA, and the U.S. Congress.
"I sometimes hear the old guard say that there would be no culture if there was no copyright monopoly. That is an outrageous insult to creators all over the world today."
When someone makes that claim, they ignore the thousands upon thousands of pieces of original music, film and pictures that artists, normal people, make available for free to everyone on the Internet every day.
Personally I broadly approve of the 5 year term proposed by the pirate party.. it would still allow business to invest and get a return, but also allow information to be freely and openly shared with society within a reasonable time frame.
What's not true is that we'll continue to get the exact same kinds of things created. (Some of you may think that's a good thing.)
Take a feature film, for example. A film costs around $100 million to make, and $20 million to market.
Without copyright, that film can be easily copied by Illegitimate Theater Chain and then shown without paying the creator. Does anyone here think that $100 million films will continue to be made and marketed under such a system?
I don't.
Maybe, as a society, we shouldn't care about $100 million dollar feature films and maybe no one will be upset that they're no longer made in exchange for having no copyright laws.
One thing is clear though: copyright is the legal mechanism that allows $100 million feature films to be made today, and without it, they won't be.
So I think the question is should so much money be made from some of these things?
Should for example actors and sports players be insanely rich while teachers and other public servants make so little?
How much is a Hollywood movie really going to cost to produce in five years? (Ignoring inflated writing/acting expenses.)
The more I think about it, America would look very different if there was no copyright. There wouldn't be the huge companies that we have today. For example Disney has the sole rights to produce Mickey Mouse based products, but if anyone anywhere could produce Mickey Mouse based products, then suddenly a hole lot less money is streaming into Disney, and just take that effect and multiply it out=no more mega corps.
It would change the face of commerce and to that effect even employment, you'd probably have many more small businesses and a lot less "corporations".
In any case it would have very far reaching effects...
When profit is disassociated from revenue, a lot of padding will go on. See the USA's defence industry for another example.
I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but it could probably restrict ticket sales to licensees without requiring draconian enforcement.
This is an overreach. While you might not be able to imagine how it could be done, history shows that the market is extremely resilient and resourceful. I might agree if copyright had never existed, but now that people have a taste for such works, the market will find a way to provide them.
Game of Thrones costs $4.5 million per episode. Would HBO really make them at that cost if every one of their competitors could re-broadcast them the following day, without any kind of payment to HBO? If Target and Best Buy could just sell the DVD and Blu-ray a week later without any kind of payment to HBO?
I doubt it.
I'm not saying we won't have films -- we would -- but they wouldn't be even remotely as costly as what we have today. (Not everything one thinks that's a bad thing.)
It's a fine line we're walking here. I don't want to defend the copyright lobby but I'm not ready to say all this new "art" is good for culture either.
Good things, works of art, survive. Those LOLCats will still be there in the future, sure, and some people may even appreciate them. But for those who don't, filtering out the "simple" stuff shouldn't be an issue.
The music I've been listening to all day has been produced by people who love what they're doing. They don't want your money. For them, it's enough that you take time and listen to their music. That's why they distribute it for free. And I can tell you that out of the things created by teenagers today, there are things I will appreciate just as much, or even more, in 50 years. That's more than enough to make them art to me.
And as for culture, well culture is created by all of us. You or I or the next guy may have good taste but that doesn't mean the majority do. So when this ridiculous amount of creation goes on that means there will be far more crap than gems and with so much crap to wade through eventually it'll be lost and Lolcats will be considered culture and it'll be a sad day for culture. I'd like to believe that good things survive, I really do but that seems too optimistic to me. The music you've discovered wont be considered part of the culture of the future. Lady Gaga will. That's just what happens when there's so much to choose from.
And please, why would lady gaga be considered part of the culture? When you think about the 1700s do you remember Mozart or popular music? Because Lady Gaga is popular music. Mozart is not.
The fact that something is popular now, doesn't mean it will be in the future. And, as the masses didn't listen to Mozart at that time, we don't listen to contemporary music (I mean what in the future would be considered the 'classical music' of our time).
Survivorship bias. We just forgot about all the crap back then because nobody bothered to save many copies of it and the bad works have been forgotten, if not lost.
LOLCats will probably go the way of AYBABTU and Chuck Norris jokes one of these days. And later people will look back and only remember things like the Grey Album instead.
That's the same way people nowadays look back at 60s music with so much nostalgia, thinking of the Beatles and not, for example, "They're Coming to Take Me Away" by Napoleon the IV.
The problem is that the distributors (formerly) had tremendous leverage over the creators because they controlled the distribution (access to paying customers). Through the monopoly of the distribution channels, they were able to coerce the creators to reassign or license at a pittance their copyrights to them.
The "new media" (e.g. internet) is allowing direct distribution from the creator to the customer, squeezing out the "old guild" distributors. Disrupting the distribution monopoly of the "old guild" distributors is a Good Thing and is happening right now, and with the copyright monopoly still in place.
Disposing of copyright entirely as advocated by the article would cause horrible "collateral damage" to creators.
This is not as simple a question as it sounds. Before digital distribution, owning the copyright on a book in a world with no publishers would have been pointless. So while a writer might be granted a copyright, it was nonetheless for the benefit of distributors. People don't need to be financially incentivized to create art, but they do need to be financially incentivized to invest in printing presses, shipping networks, and book stores.