The Debate Itself

The ‘debate’ over copyright has spawned into a separate entity, at times entirely removed from the suffering creators and industries themselves, its warring ‘intelligentsia’ including representatives from a diverse range of fields to whom the argument is sometimes only obscurely relevant. Most spotlighted in the debate has been the music industry, having bore the full brunt of the public’s en-masse infringement of copyright laws. The ‘debate’ involves a ‘free or fee’ type discussion about consumer-ethics and whether or not all users of P2P networks (the very servers providing illegal appropriation of MP3 files) should be fined/incarcerated; or alternatively, whether a new consumer model should be introduced accomodating (as opposed to resisting) this technological advent, supplying consumers with the means to bypass distributors in the acquisition of ‘content’.

The Social Aims

The advent of technology enabling the illegal appropriation of content on-line, obviously undermines existing copyright laws. However, it has been argued that the decentralization of content (music, literature, ‘intellectual property’ etc), though antithetical to the economic aims of society, is conducive to it’s social aims (Yglesias, 2010). Yglesias (2010) in response to those critical of an increasingly global community of ‘pirates’, refutes complaints that such conduct, allegedly undermining not just distributors but also weakening  the incentives for authors themselves  to create new content, cites Harvard scholar Kolen Strumpf in his observation of a sixty-percent increase in the productivity of those ‘creative industries’ said to be suffering, surprising in view of a corresponding (and substantial) loss of profit.  The above alludes to  a totality of ‘creative’ output, the ‘culture industry’ so to speak, and states the unlawful appropriation of content has stimulated an expansion of output,  which would suggest it is distributors rather than artists suffering from the trend, artist’s incentives inexplicably transcending conventional consumer models and leaving the drudgery of ‘analogue-distribution’ behind. Bill Rosenblatt ( Dykstra,2003) similarly observed the divergence of a new ‘digital’ consumer model from the existing ‘analogue’ one, noting the former expressed changing consumer wants and needs (“ ...consumers get what they want even if it’s illegal”) that were improvising a model which industries should duly take note of if they expect to continue making profit, rather than stress it’s illegality.

Constitutional Quirks = Pricey Plumbing

Julian Sanchez (2010) is less extremist in his views on copyright, though in agreement over the rigidity of the laws as antithetical to the continuation of culture and its incentives, which the laws are meant to be protecting. Sanchez tentatively quotes Sonny Bunch (America’s Future Foundation) in Bunch’s critique of Yglesias’s “oddly solipsistic reading” of copyright’s ‘social aims’, Bunch concluding emphatically with “artists. . .have a right to profit from their labours”. Sanchez rebuts Bunch’s defence of copyright’s assertion of “exclusive rights to the promotion of artistic and scientific progress” by citing some of the law’s ‘convenient’ ambiguities, or “fuzzy boundaries”. ‘Fair use’ Sanchez explains is a constitutional loophole, allowing a low-level of unauthorised usage of someone else’s ‘property’ (intellectual property that is, not a squatters law); however, what legally amounts to a ‘low level’ is a grey area, frustratingly void of pre-emptive legal reference. What is more, Sanchez cites the absurd reach of ‘fair use’ as encompassing the rights of those providing mere services. Does this mean plumbers and electricians have the legal ammunition to sue competitor industry-men for copyright infringement? Conceivably, yes.

So how do we do this . . .

The opinion of a publisher, someone close to the heart of distribution itself is in order. Though as insistent on the rigor of the creative industries over the absolutism of copyright as both Yglesias and Sanchez, publisher Helen Alexander (2010) posits an artist’s right to profit from his or her productivity as not just an adherence to increasingly outmoded models of consumerism, but as celebration of key-contributors in cultural-output, a show of appreciation from a public whose indefatigable appetite begs as much. So, rather than strengthen the might of current laws, and without offering a neat model, Alexander suggests that however copyright laws realistically adapt to the digital age, they need to pose a “credible threat” to users, consisting of the following;

1.       Fairness, “fair to content owners AND distributors”, a given.

2.       Enforceability, “recognizing that expectations in this area have changed and we can’t clog up the courts with this”, the presumable meaning of which is that the global instance of piracy has dissociated the practice from its earlier ‘criminal’ identifications. The existing penalties are arbitrarily severe and need to align more realistically with consumer wants/needs.

3.       Future-Proof, “tomorrows peer to peer (or P2P networks) will be very different from today’s”, namely a functional implementation of all the above, legitimating the present illegality of P2P forums by a profitable revision of their current model.

Judith Sullivan has a few things to say about policy making of a similar vein, having worked alongside the government departments responsible for the fine-tuning of copyright law. Of like opinion, she states the mediation of content between creator/distributor and consumer needs to be instrumental, first and foremost, to the creative industries, essentially maintaining the self-sufficiency of these even over consumer needs (as a creative industry at the mercy of its consumers would inevitably lose the incentive to innovate at all, they’d merely be following trends); “Policy making needs to deliver a legal framework that encourages creativity to flourish, by permitting those who create and invest in creativity to obtain a reward”.

On a final note, it could be said that the emergence of models such as i-tunes and other internet forums imitative of P2P networks, in which individual songs can be purchased for a small fee, signify the industry subsuming methods of piracy with which the public is familiar, finally regaining control of content as distributors. However, the pricing of content to be distributed in such a way becomes a matter of heated debate between creators and distributors; according to frequent blogger Nate Anderson (2010), the price of a song purchased in such a way is increasingly arbitrary, as (echoing Yglesias) it’s cost should be marginally that of it’s distribution. The price then of a single song being sold at a tenth of it’s distribution cost, distribution over the internet of but one song being dangerously close to zero, will inevitably be zero.

The debate over copyright is multifacetted and enduring, and predictably a solution to the mostly economic concerns of those faced with powerlessness to a newer, rabidly 'pirate' consumerism will be a long time coming. Meanwhile, the gates for free file retrieval are wide open, and will be so for as long as it's keepers are suitably flummoxed. Enjoy!


REFERENCES

Alexander, H. (2010). The role of the creative industries in rebuilding the UK economy. Retrieved September 21, 2010, from http://copyright-debate.co.uk/?p=489

Anderson, N. (2010). Contextualizing the copyright debate: reward vs. creativity. Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/contextualizing-the-copyright-debate-reward-vs-creativity.ars

Information Today, Inc. (2003) The great copyright debate (Press Release). Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://www.infotoday.com/it/oct03/dykstra.shtml

Sanchez, J. (2010). How much right in a copyright?. Retrieved August 24, 2010, from http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/02/02/how-much-right-in-a-copyright/

Sullivan, J. (n. d.). How can government meet the challenges of balancing effective copyright protection in the digital age against the needs of users?. Retrieved September 21, 2010, from http://copyright-debate.co.uk/?p=189

Yglesias, M. (2010). Filesharing, copyright and production. Retrieved August 24, 2010, from http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/06/file-sharing-copyright-and-production/