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.