Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money
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And of course, as most people here probably already know, that's not how IP was invented. It was not a conclusion from trying to come up to a solution for investing in ideas. No sane human being would have thought that was a solution. IP was invented as a monarchy monopoly to give power to the king. The "but it's good for innovation" meme was an excuse invented later when they figured they could actually make a lot of money from it, so those who were profiting off monopolies had to find an excuse to keep it.
It's so mind boggling to watch so many discussions where people ask "the ultimate hard question" of "but how else could be possibly incentive ideas without copyright???". C'mon, it's so straight-forward and we've been doing it for centuries. YC alone has done much more for promoting innovative creative works than copyright has done since it's invention. Do you really care about investing in ideas? Then put your money where your mouth is, become an angel investor, and stop pretending it's a hard problem to solve.
http://web.archive.org/web/20010124060000/www.voodooextreme....
However, some of the patents i've seen being battled out in court is about the _shape_ of a phone. Rounded corners. Swipe, pinch to zoom, and bounce when reached the end of a list.
These things are not worthy of being patented, and none of them are non-obvious enough to be called innovative. it is at these patents that ruin the system.
As for YC, etc... What a ridiculous bit of self-important exaggeration. Scribd, AirBnB, Discus... Oh my god all the innovation! More innovation than has ever been made possible by the patent laws or the copyright laws over the course of history! Seriously, I think YC, etc, is great, but let's not forget that there is a whole world of technology out there, and internet startups are one small niche. In most technology fields, all the money YC has ever handed out would barely make a dent in the capital requirements of bringing a product even to the prototype stage.
Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.
Why is free-riding bad unless it reduces the incentive for innovation? If half the world can free-ride on something with no marginal cost that will be produced regardless of the free-riding, the result is greater economic efficiency.
>You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if there was nothing preventing Tandy, etc, from buying a single IBM machine, copying the OS off the disks, and selling as many machines with Windows loaded as they wanted without paying any licensing fees to Microsoft?
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.
>Also, let's not rewrite history here. Intellectual proponents of copyright and patent law include people like Thomas Jefferson, who none would accuse of being a monarchist.
The text below was written by Thomas Jefferson -- it isn't exactly a ringing endorsement:
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. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Free-riding is a narrower concept than simply reduced incentives. There are lots of different incentives and lots of different ways to increase or reduce incentives, but free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs.
> I don't think anyone is suggesting that Microsoft would be able to survive with the same business model in the absence of copyright. But the real question is, would there still be operating systems? And obviously there would be -- at the very least BSD and GNU/Linux and the like.
That's not really the full extent of the question. It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems?
BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project. That's a viable and popular model, but do we want to rely on the Department of Defense for an even larger fraction of our technology? I used to work for a DARPA contractor. They're not the world's most efficient way to develop technology. We use DARPA for blue-sky things the market doesn't invest in naturally, not because it's a great way to develop new technology.
Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches. Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did? An incentive scheme that relies on government funding or personal hobbies results in very different software than one where a customer can pay a vendor for a piece of software. And I think there is much to be said about how the latter incentive model incentivizes the creation of software that the public wants rather than say what is most useful to the military.
It's interesting to see how recent developments built on Linux have been monetized. Nobody can make money selling Linux directly to cell phone vendors, like Microsoft did selling Windows to PC vendors, so what you have instead is a platform, Android, based entirely on the perpetuation of Google's search/advertising empire. Instead of paying cash for an OS, people pay in the form of their privacy, because that's something that can be monetized in a world where software cannot be monetized. Is that better?
- It's not technically true that you can't make money selling Linux, but even if it wasn't, it's a red herring; Google could certainly sell Android. The reason they don't has to do with their business model, nothing else.
- It's not true that you can't make money selling it to cell phone developers. What you do is not charge for current software, but for future development. As an employee of a company which sells GPL licensed software, I can tell you it's a very viable business model.
- Google could also charge for access to their services, including App Store.
Secondly, the idea that you are spied upon because it's free is very naive; how do you think Apple's Ad network (iAd) can target Demographics, Application preferences, Music passions, Movie, TV and audiobook genre interests and even Location? Guess what: the consumer is paying with cash and their privacy.
It's a viable business model in the small, not when you're developing software for a huge market where a handful of customers can't bankroll future versions of the software.
> Secondly, the idea that you are spied upon because it's free is very naive; how do you think Apple's Ad network (iAd) can target Demographics, Application preferences, Music passions, Movie, TV and audiobook genre interests and even Location? Guess what: the consumer is paying with cash and their privacy.
The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models. A lot of those monetization models involve privacy-invasion through advertising, etc. Paying for software doesn't eliminate that obviously, but rather when software can't be sold as a product the equilibrium moves to a very different place.
That depends entirely on your apparent assumption that only high-overhead organizations can produce software for broad use. This is clearly not the case.
> The point is that when companies cannot sell the software directly, they need to rely on alternative monetization models.
It's lucky, then, that nobody has credibly established that copyright is necessary to be able to sell software directly -- or that things that are bad for the nominal customers are the only options for alternate revenue models.
AnthonyMouse didn't say otherwise. This is a non-sequitur.
> free-riding addresses the specific case of where the ability to copy a design cheaply and easily and thus undercut the inventor reduces or eliminates the incentive to invest in new designs.
In this case, yes, that's the theory. The problem is that there is no meaningful evidence to support the notion that incentives are affected in this way by the effective elimination of copyright or patent monopolies. Consider, for instance, the fashion industry -- specifically a no-fly-zone for patents and copyrights, but highly active and very lucrative for successful firms. More interestingly, it pays the designers, the actually "artists" of the industry, far more consistently than some copyright industries (e.g. record industry) and far with far more significant high-end payouts for top performers than other copyright industries (e.g. software development).
As statistics in Falkvinge's article show, however, the consistency across the field has been increasing in the record industry since the advent of Napster, thanks to such effects as increased directness of the business relationship between the artist and the consumer (bypassing the copyright dependent record industry infrastructure). Meanwhile, the watermark for top performer income in software development is also rising thanks to the rise of business models independent of copyright protections, such as served by facilitators like Kickstarter and Humble Bundle and the growth of foundations supported by voluntary donations that fund open source projects.
> It's not just whether there would be operating systems, but would the market be served as well by those operating systems?
Yes, absolutely. There. Asked and answered.
> BSD was a university research project that arose in the context of a major DARPA project.
This is no more accurate than your statement that Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of copyright and patent law. UNIX was originally created by software developers within AT&T Bell Labs, in part to scratch an organizational internal itch, and made available for free to universities; BSD Unix was originally created as what amounted to a patchset by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley to serve his own desire to work on the project.
It wasn't until after the third major version of BSD Unix (3BSD) was created that DARPA funding related to the project appeared at all. This funding guided the direction of BSD Unix development for the 4BSD release, of course, but given the history of the previous three versions it seems ludicrous to suggest that without DARPA interest the BSD Unix project would have suddenly evaporated and we would never have a publicly accessible BSD Unix. You are, for some reason, seeing the existence of DARPA funding at a late stage of UC Berkeley involvement in Unix development as some kind of evidence that DARPA funding was a necessary precondition for the existence and continued development of BSD Unix, which is a wholly unwarranted conclusion.
Subsequent to meeting the DARPA-directed goals of 4BSD, development went back to what it had been before: largely Bill Joy scratching an itch. 4.1BSD was essentially the result of him tinkering with kernel performance. While DARPA still kept its hand in things, it basically served as bureaucratic overhead, which the developers accepted because their parent organizations received what amounted to bribes. To suggest that somehow BSD Unix would not have existed without DARPA funding is just laughably without supporting evidence. It's like saying that without Avatar there never would have been 3D movies. S Cameron's movie represented a huge influx of capital into the 3D movie industry, and it suddenly looked like 3D movies were the future, but after the hype waned the result is that a lot of people realize that 3D is not magic fairy dust that automatically makes movies Better. They further realized that 3D movie technologies and techniques were actually progressing for a long time leading up to that moment when conditions were right for someone to take advantage of a confluence of factors to create a big-budget, very popular 3D movie. James Cameron, it could be argued, was just in the right place at the right time, and as a result he got credit in the history of 3D movies far out of proportion to his actual contribution -- just like DARPA in the development of BSD Unix according to your version of history.
> Linux started as a personal hobby, and the incentive structure has always relied heavily on people scratching their own itches.
It's funny how you take a strong argument against the necessity of copyright, turn it around, and present it as though it's some kind of argument for copyright. No, it doesn't work like that; the Linux kernel and the huge communities that have arisen around it all add up to a gigantic counterargument for the notion that we wouldn't have useful operating systems without copyright.
> Would either have served the home computer user market like Windows did?
With greater interest, in the absence of a market-dominating monopolist, I'm sure it would have served the home computer user market far better than MS Windows did in the real world. After all, MS Windows is the result of push-marketing, where a huge corporation decides what it will sell based on its judgments of the most "efficient" production methods for its purposes, then spends ungodly amounts of money on marketing to convince people that's what they want to acquire. By contrast, open source OS projects serve the actual interests -- the economic demand -- of actual users. The fact that Microsoft has effectively muscled the lion's share of competition out of the market through means largely unrelated to directly competitive provision of quality limits the actual sources of market inputs to the development plans of other OS developers so that they tend to focus on narrower target audiences; the narrower target audience influence on their development is thus in part a result of the existence of MS Windows, and not a natural state of affairs that ensures BSD Unix projects could never serve the same user demographics as MS Windows.
You're not talking about what would realistically happen in the absence of copyright, in other words. You're just talking about what happens if you remove a copyright-dependent organization and assume nothing else would change, which is quite unrealistic.
As for your assertions about smartphone support, icebraining responded to thats, I'll stop producing Wall Of Text.
I'd also add that if anything copyright has left us poorer because it promotes software and other content that doesn't permit free-riding. GNU/Linux and BSD probably would have occurred much sooner and become the dominant platform in the world if copyright had not afforded Microsoft the money to spend on every which way to compete besides simply building a better product.
"You think any sensible VC would have invested in Microsoft if..." What you mean is, "Do you think Microsoft would have had the same business model if...", No I don't think they would have. Would billions still have been made on the PC market? Of fucking course.
The rest of your comment is pretty ranty and without a concrete argument.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
-- United States Constitution
Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an author's creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.
> > Intellectual property rights are an exception to that norm, and they are granted only when – and only to the extent that – they are necessary to encourage invention.
Meanwhile, you have not offered an alternative justification for copyright monoplies, as far as I've noticed.
edit: It's also notable that a major purpose of Lemley's paper is to debunk the notion that there is any meaningful "free rider problem" in the world of patentable and copyrightable, but you claim a "free rider problem" is a major incentive to keep copyright and patent law.
The notion that Thomas Jefferson was a proponent of copyright and patent law is just flat-out wrong. He was profoundly suspicious of the notion that government enforced monopolies on ideas and their expressions could have any but the most dangerous, counter productive effects, and has written eloquently of the benefits of the natural tendency of knowledge to spread freely regardless of attempts to restrict it. What he did was not support copyrights and patents -- it was to resign himself to the fact that others developing policy while he was serving overseas as an ambassador made the decision to include copyright and patent law in that policy.
As for the chastisement . . . one did not (and does not) have to be a monarchist to completely wrong about copyright policy. Pretending the argument is that one must be a monarchist, just because someone pointed out its monarchical roots, is to mischaracterize the argument so you can deride it without actually addressing its substance.
Every investor asks how defensible is your company. For certain products: drugs, microprocessors, and countless other capital intensive products patents protection is one of the important mechanisms for defending marketshare.
For example, it takes tens of millions of dollars to design a new drug and get it through trails. If competitors could just copy it as soon as it was released, the company that did the original work could not recoup its R&D costs and would eventually go broke. Without patent protection, no one would invest in companies that designed new drugs and innovation would stagnate.
Copyright provides a defense mechanism for creative companies like Disney. Again, it takes tens (to hundreds) of millions of dollars to develop a movie. If anyone could just copy it and sell it, Disney would could not recoup its production costs. No one would buy Disney stock. Creative expression would stagnate.
Are there problems with the current patent and copyright laws? Yes.
But the fundamental protections they were intended to provide are still necessary for innovation and creation to flourish in a market economy.
Imagine, if before Einstein, you put 20 smart people in a room and tell them to come up with ideas about mass and energy. None of them would...well, you get the idea.
Look, I'm not saying that copyright is all that. I'm just saying that if you want to argue against it, you need to find a basis MUCH more intelligent than the one you've selected, because if there's one thing that science has demonstrated about the world, it's that the intuitive thing is often wrong, and sometimes spectacularly so.
We now have this thing "information" (software, music, books, whatever) that can be useful for us, and which has the property that it can be copied infinitely without cost; but then we turn around turn it back into something that behaves like a "physical thing" by means of copyright.
On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live.
Copyright is interesting even if artists were to sell their own music independently of the labels. Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit.
Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license.
(Note these comments are true to copyright, but not for patents, which is a completely different story)
Open Source is bigger than copyleft software. Without copyright, BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software would thrive.
Also without copyright, closed source software would not generate the kind of money it does now, so there would be less incentive to invest in it vs. investing in open source software. One could say that Open Source gets a competitive advantage when all software can legally be copied for free.
How do you think they maintain those monopolies? Hint: a lot of it is directly related to copyright monopolies. Think of the hundreds or thousands of recording artists who would abandon the labels if they could get back the ability to publish their own songs, rather than having to ask the label for permission due to copyright assignments and work-for-hire claims.
> Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit.
Nonsense. Copyright creates a market for the transfer of copyright, which immediately plays into the hands of large-scale distributors by ensuring nobody can compete with them. The economies of their scale are not natural economies; they're economies created by an artificially high barrier to entry for competitors, and the artificial scarcity imposed on markets by copyright law is the primary advantage enjoyed by such large-scale distributors.
> Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license.
Well, jkn already answered this point, but I'll add an additional comment on this subject:
We'd be better off without copyleft licensing. Software does not have to be GPLed to be open source, and in fact the GPL and other copyleft licenses actually stand in the way of many open source projects making use of code distributed under those copyleft licenses.
Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another. I don't know anyone who supports copyright and believes it to be the only way for creative folks to make money.
The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.
The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are.
Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright. There's an entire world of creative industries and bazillions in cash going into those industries, so finding more than an occasional study and isolated success story shouldn't be that hard... if their position is actually correct.
I am making this post anyway because I think you'll benefit from these links I mentioned in an earlier post.
And to be frank, I'm unlikely to be swayed by the kinds of pages you linked to indirectly in your reply, either, because they appear to repeat the same poorly thought out arguments as everyone else.
Sure, performing musicians can make money playing live. Shame if you're a composer or lyricist or a technician in the recording studio, I guess.
Sure, people can make low budget computer games and sell them for a nominal amount to an audience of geeks sympathetic to their pricing model. Shame if you want to play a AAA grade game with realistic graphics, professional quality character designs, professional quality voice acting, professional quality orchestral score, well-balanced gameplay, non-repetitive level designs, and an AI smarter than a snail, I guess.
Sure, we can find plenty of pulp fiction quality self-published stories on-line for free. Shame if you need a well-structured, professionally edited textbook for your kid's math class complete with a full set of exercises, I guess.
The same pattern comes up time and again in the cheap shots against copyright. Usually, the argument is either some variation of "plenty of work gets made anyway" but looking only at quantity and not quality, or some variation of "the artists can earn money by {some other model}" but without taking into account all the people who genuinely contribute to producing good work but aren't the immediate performer.
And then someone comes along and points out the isolated exceptions: a handful of big name FOSS products (invariably in fields that are widely applicable and attractive to a lot of geeks, which is a tiny part of the overall software landscape, and invariably ignoring any role copyright played in the development model of those products), a couple of performers who've made money with a high profile online experiment (usually people who were already well known thanks to their earlier work funded by more traditional models), and so on.
One of these days, I'd like to start a page with all the eternally repeated examples in this context and try to figure out how many of them there really are and what proportion of their overall industries they actually represent. Alas, since no-one is going to pay me for that work, I had better go back to building my copyright-protected company where the revenues do go straight to the handful of people who are putting in huge amounts of hard work to do things no-one has ever done before, which apparently doesn't exist in Falkvinge's mind because we're all under 40.
An industry's failure to create a sustainable business model in the face of the reality that technology has created isn't a failing of the technology. It would be nice if business would just optimize for reality instead of trying (and repeatedly failing) to bend reality through legislation.
I don't accept your premise. The situation is too similar to a tragedy of the commons, with a large dose of ignorance mixed in: most people outside the creative industries have no idea how much hard work by how many different kinds of people ultimately contributes to that smash hit music recording or novel or computer game. They just think of it as the latest track from $singer or the latest book from $author/$publisher or the latest game from $studio.
Take a look at how long the credits are the next time you watch a blockbuster movie that you enjoy, and see how many of the job titles you even understand. Unless you work in the movies, it will probably be a small minority, yet without all the others you probably wouldn't have enjoyed the movie nearly so much, assuming it even existed.
The trouble is, a lot of people have got used to two conflicting views in recent years: we expect ever higher creative values in works (which come with a higher sunk cost to produce the work initially) and yet we see that we can redistribute them cheaply and quickly (which implies a marginal cost near zero). If you don't have copyright, or some other economic tool, to amortise the huge sunk cost over a similarly huge audience, then you can't afford to make the work in the first place and the fact that the marginal cost of physical reproduction/redistribution is now near zero doesn't help you.
This is basically how blockbusters are financed nowadays, so it's a viable proposition. There's no evidence that changing from copyright to patronage would change that outcome.
When patronage was en vogue, we didn't have as high a rate of literacy or access to digital editing tools. These facilitations of the process of creation, even ignoring things like cheap paper and disposable writing implements that last months and cost less than a bottle of water, dwarf any legal changes that might otherwise apply (notwithstanding France's dark period of outlawing the printing press altogether as a tool of sedition). If copyright has anything to do with the current rate of creation, it is primarily by impeding the spread of inspirational materials that might otherwise hasten creative people's efforts. Compare copyright-controlled England with mostly copyright-free Germany in the 1800s to see how the freedom to copy and resell lit a fire under the asses of both writers and publishers, and created a lot more writers by spreading knowledge far and wide and as rapidly as possible to create a (for the era) highly educated population.
> it would take lots of very rich people giving up a lot of their wealth to get anywhere near funding just what today's movie industry costs
I think it's pretty clear that there is little correlation between relative level of funding and relative quality in the movie industry. In any case, there are other ways to get funding without relying on copyright than purely status-related patronage.
But huge numbers of people apparently value the works we do produce today that have those expensive production values, and in the case of works created for utility rather than entertainment, the usefulness of the work may drop off rapidly if it's not as well made.
Technology has changed the landscape, and unless you're willing to live in a police state with strict regulations on general purpose computing and communications technology, that genie isn't getting back in the bottle.
Technology has changed many landscapes, but just because we can do something, that doesn't mean we should. Most people recognise that certain acts are harmful to specific people or to society as a whole, and we legislate to make those acts illegal. We can certainly debate whether copying a knowledge work under various conditions is such an act, and if so, whether copyright is an appropriate response, but I don't think "This is the way the world is, deal with it" is a compelling argument. Anarchy would be very unpleasant for many members of society.
I would be interested in a survey of the public, which said we can dump copyright, in return for losing almost all high cost games, movies and TV. I would guess the majority of people would vote to keep copyright.
Also, your complaint about them being 'strawmen' is true, but makes no sense. They are common 'myths, which is to say exaggerations of things people claim everyday. You yourself make several of his 'myths' in your post.
> The creative argument in favour of copyright is simply that more useful works get generated and distributed with it than without it.
Translation:
> Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.
> The economic argument is also very simple: the people making those works need to put food on the table. Despite all the rhetoric, nothing is stopping them from doing that in other ways right now, yet relatively few people actually are.
Translation:
> Myth: With free sharing, nobody will spend money on entertainment.
They aren't supposed to be perfect quoted arguments from real live people; just push back on common rhetoric.
Translation:
> Myth: Without the incentive of possibly getting money, nobody will go into artistry and create.
That isn't even close to the same thing, and neither was your second example. Like Falkvinge, you have turned a relative position (without copyright, less of X would be made) into an absolute (without copyright, none of X would be made). I have never seen anyone, not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.
More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position. There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
I have. I see it all the time, mostly in online discussion. No, I don't maintain a database of every such discussion in which I've participated, tagged with metadata about the fallacies employed in various discussions.
> not even the most corrupt media industry lobbyist or the most position-distorting, bought-and-paid-for politician, argue complete absolutes like that.
That's because they generally prefer to avoid speaking in absolutes except in specific, rare cases. The implications are obvious, even when their phrasing allows for what they think constitutes plausible deniability.
> More importantly, I have certainly never seen anyone genuinely interested in changing copyright law for the better promoting such a position.
It's not the people who want to change copyright law for the better that I'm most worried about. It's the people who want to maintain the status quo, plus add more restrictions, that are the biggest problem. Maybe you haven't said such things, and maybe you're interested in improving things in your own misguided way, but (for instance) Chris Dodd is only interested in improving the position of the MPAA -- and I'm pretty sure he has a hell of a lot more sway with Congress than you.
> There are alternatives to the mess that is today's implementation of copyright that don't involve killing the entire principle.
Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
Well, since you appear to be quite happy putting words under my fingertips, perhaps you'd like to tell me what I think on this subject? I'll give you a free clue to start with: at no point in this discussion have I come anywhere within a hundred miles of defending the likes of Chris Dodd and the xxAA style Big Media lobbying groups, whose attitudes I have opposed consistently up to and including contacting my elected government formally on several occasions. (I'm not in the US, but we have some similarly aggressive copyright advocates here in Europe who are just as dangerous.)
My problem with a lot of the more recent comments in this discussion is that it's suddenly turned from talking about the original article to talking about some strawman at the opposite extreme as if those of us who don't agree with Falkvinge are somehow supporting the status quo. The original article takes an IMHO foolish absolute position of completely revoking copyright without proposing any alternative model to promote creation and distribution of new works. However, the alternative of breaking the social bargain the other way is no more palatable to me, with its effectively unending copyright via the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and similar legislation, ever more absurd penalties for hypothetical and often purely economic damages, and so on.
There is a middle ground, and what I would have hoped would be a common sense viewpoint: legislative policy on this kind of issue should be driven by clear moral and/or economic principles, and it should be made based on empirical evidence wherever possible. As far as I'm concerned, neither of the sides taking extreme views on copyright is even close to having a decent case based on real data so far.
Yep -- and they're great stepping stones on the way to eliminating prior restraint of the free act of creation.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue there, but it looks like it's somewhere between a slippery slope fallacy and an attempt to undermine the existence of any legal system.
Source bias is a concern when the source is supplying unverifiable facts. When a source is supplying reasoning, it can be evaluated for consistency and validity independent of the source and attacking the source is just the ad hominem fallacy.
Incidentally, who do you think would be making anti-copyright arguments, Christopher Dodd?
>Aside from that, this whole article is one strawman after another.
A strawman is when you take a weak argument that opponents never made and proceed to knock it down, then use the failure of the weak argument to argue that a stronger argument is also wrong. In this case, the positions being attacked are ones that have actually been taken by industry supporters at various points during lobbying efforts to pass copyright legislation. Perhaps there are stronger arguments in favor of copyright than the ones the industry has been putting forward, but then let's hear those in the halls of Congress and stop hearing the ones that are so ridiculous that you think they're strawman arguments.
>Really, all the anti-copyright people have to do to make a rock solid argument for their case is show that industrial-scale creative work is more effective using alternative business models rather than relying on copyright.
The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain? (And hey, if we try not having copyright for a decade or two and it turns out badly, we can always put it back.)
Really? You can cite a lobbyist who actually claimed that without copyright, there was no way for any artist to make money? Or that with free sharing, no-one at all would spend money on entertainment? Or that no-one at all creates new art without the financial incentive?
Lobbyists say some pretty silly things, and distort reality to absurd degrees, but even then I've never heard anyone making such a black-and-white argument before a legislative assembly.
The only real way to actually test the hypothesis that creativity would thrive in today's economy in the absence of copyright is to have the absence of copyright for a while and see what happens. For example, how else can you tell what derivative works would be created if permission was not required to produce them for commercial gain?
That's a fair point, but it's not a counter to my argument. There is nothing whatsoever about today's copyright law that stops someone from funding completely new works using alternative business models and giving those works away such that they can be freely distributed. If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
It seems plenty of people are willing to try disrupting Big Media, given the number of people who are self-publishing books instead of relying on traditional publishers, putting their band's music on-line via their own web sites, and so on. But why does almost every success story seem to stop there? One possible explanation is that the only legal barrier between those self-publishers and an Amazon-scale operation redistributing anything good via a much better known web site and taking most of the profits is copyright...
[Edit: Clarified the wording in the last paragraph.]
That's pretty easy - the return for the creator is higher with copyright than without. Hence, in the current system, there is no incentive for alternative models to really develop (outside of some niches --- software is maybe a limited counterexample, with licences like the GPL demonstrating what might happen if copyright did not exist). Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent.
I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, if, as self-confessed pirates have frequently argued on sites like Slashdot, the advertising side-effect of sharing works freely ultimately generates more revenue for the creator than copyright-controlled distribution, then the logical move even with copyright is to put those works into the public domain and invite donations to support the creator. However, that risks the alternative possibility that the "advertising benefit" agument really is just another pyramid scheme, and without enough law-abiding (with copyright)/donation-giving (without copyright) people at the end of it to support everyone else, it's just rationalising freeloading.
Also, your argument does not take into account the fact that without copyright derivative works would be utilized to a much fuller extent.
There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter.
Indeed, and plenty of artists nowadays (both big and small) have experimented to a certain degree with this model. It has its benefits and downsides but largely your argument is not particularly relevant to the topic of the article: the question is not 'Would content creators be better off without copyright?', it is 'Would society be better off without copyright?' The economic optimum is for creators to make the fixed costs of producing the work and nothing else; there is little incentive for them to support changing the current system which gives them an essentially unlimited monopoly on their work. The article is merely meant to outline some ways in which creators could get their fixed costs covered without copyright.
There are definitely valid arguments against copyright based on greater use of derivative works. The problem is that it is also possible that derivative works would become dominant if it were easy to make them and much harder to create something original, with little incentive to do the latter.
Why is this a problem? Modern popular culture demonstrates pretty conclusively that most people have no problem with works that are essentially derivative..
I don't think economics works the way you think it does. You just removed not only the incentive to make a better (but more expensive to produce) work but also the financial incentive to create any work at all.
Why is this a problem?
Why is it a problem to replace a system that supports the creation of original, innovative works with a system that pushes heavily toward creating endless derivative works and minor variations of the same tired ideas? Are you really asking that question seriously?
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
Economic theory offers no justification for awarding creators anything beyond what is necessary to recover their average fixed costs.
I think I'm fairly happy putting my faith in him knowing how economics works.
I think, contrary to your suggestion, that plenty of people are already fed up with the same old movie sequels and annual releases by the same computer game franchises and so on. But that's what happens when the system doesn't effectively support those who would create more interesting alternatives, which typically aren't as profitable on a first outing but cost more to produce. Coming soon: Cloned Sports Franchise 2013 edition, with ads shown every five minutes during your favourite fly-on-the-wall reality TV show.
Do you think Notch would have problems raising funding on Kickstarter? How about Quentin Tarantino? How about Amanda Palmer, of the Dresden Dolls? How about the XX? Stuff which has a cult following seems to fare well under the patronage model.
Most of the really high budget stuff turns out to be fairly derivative. There are exceptions, but they're rare.
I'll grant you that the phrasing of the 'myths' on the site is more absolute than is generally used by copyright proponents, but the arguments are extremely common with minor qualifiers, e.g. that free sharing causes an extraordinarily large (albeit not 100%) reduction in the amount that people spend on entertainment (see generally http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/how-copyright-industries-con-...), and (most importantly) the counterarguments still apply to the less absolute versions of the argument more commonly encountered in the wild.
>If there are alternative business models that really are as effective as copyright or more so in incentivising the creation and distribution of useful works, why aren't we seeing vast amounts of such work, funded by such alternative models, in the age of the Internet?
There is an extent to which we are. See: YouTube, github, etc.
But a big piece of the trouble is that if you take any given business model, chances are the artist can make at least trivially more money by exercising some of the control the copyright monopoly provides over the work. And if copyright exists, why not do that? The consequence is that most business models are seen to involve copyright, even if they would work very nearly as well without it.
More than that, a large part of the benefit of not having copyright accrues to content consumers rather than producers. The argument is that the benefit consumers gain exceeds the benefit producers lose, i.e. that no copyright is only slightly worse for producers and vastly better for consumers, and the benefit producers lose is insufficient to significantly impact the number and quality of works produced.
That content producers can't actually be better off without copyright is of course necessarily the case for the reason you point out. If a situation arises where not having the rights granted under the copyright act is better for the content producer, the content producer can just license the rights to whoever he likes and be in the identical position as there would be with no copyright. So eliminating copyright wouldn't create any benefit for the content producer that they can't already obtain (ignoring for a moment that content producers are often simultaneously content consumers, e.g. when they produce derivative works). But that explains the lack of examples of content producers adopting non-copyright business models: They're the ones under copyright who decide whether to authorize alternative business models, but they aren't the ones who derive the bulk of the benefit from them. The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
In addition to that, there's the fact that a lot of the benefit to creators of a lack of copyright monopolies is the increased richness of source material to draw on for inspiration of new works. Don't make the mistake of thinking that I'm talking about "ripping off" existing material to make a fast buck, either. I'm talking about the fact that every creator is inspired to some extent by the works he or she consumes, but many works are not as easily accessible to the potential creators of the future, so that the inspirations that might arise after a creative person experiences a given existing work that is, unfortunately, never actually experienced by that person due to lack of legal distribution, simply never come to pass.
Then, of course, there's the fact that people have been so heavily indoctrinated by the propaganda of the copyright economy that people who have not yet made a name for themselves as creators of marketable works are convinced without any evidence apart from that indoctrination that their major problem in life is figuring out how to make money off of copyright, which to them by default involves appealing to a major distributor to publish their work. The truth of the matter, of course, is quite the opposite: the major problem in life for such a creator of marketable works is getting it into as many hands as possible. The biggest enemy of the common creative person is obscurity, not "free riders", "pirates", or whatever else people imagine would destroy their lives if not for the protectionist monopoly power of copyrights.
My experience, as a writer and programmer of mixed success, is that when people notice my work I have a difficult time stopping them from giving me money or otherwise offering me incentives to continue; when they don't notice my work, I can't get people to accept it for free. There is no hyperbole in hits. I have literally put together websites where I attempt to distribute materials for free, just because I think it's good and should be seen by more people. The result is that nobody notices for long periods of time, but then eventually people might start taking notice -- and when that happens, well, to use one recent example, someone actually tracked down one of my email addresses via intensive web searching then used PayPal to contribute money to me because they couldn't find any other way to pay me for work I had already given away to the world for free, using a license that generally mimics the conditions of a world without copyright, on a site where I specifically stated that circumstances made it legally inadvisable for me at that time to solicit any contributions for my work.
Honestly, I think the concession that people might make a little more money with copyright than without it is not only negligible, not only overcome by the unrelated benefits of a lack of restrictive copyright monopoly, but actually the opposite of how it would work in general.
In short . . .
> The argument is instead that the non-derivative content producers fail to experience a harm sufficient to outweigh the harm that copyright causes to the producers of derivative works and to consumers.
I think -- based not only on a more comprehensive overview of the economic effects of copyright than most people ever imagine, and not only on observation of what happens when people start working with business models that do not strictly rely on copyright (e.g. Radiohead, Humble Bundle, Kickstarter, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Google, EnterpriseDB, and so on), but also on personal experience many times over -- that even just considering the direct effects on published, financially successful creators themselves the benefits outweigh the detriments, and when you add in those who are not yet so successful those benefits only increase.
Then, as you say, there's the matter of people other than the creators themselves. Except for push-marketing middlemen and lawyers, everyone gains. The real reason we don't see as many examples of this in action as we'd like is because the people whose propaganda makes up the majority of the argument are the push-marketing middlemen.
Define that in a way that makes it intrinsically desirable. Otherwise, it's a red herring.