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
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 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/
