The following little article by Cory Doctorow was published on boingboing today. I guess that by re-publishing it here I am just making Cory’s point:
My latest Locus column, "Why I Copyfight," was published a couple weeks back while I was on honeymoon and made quite a stir. It’s intended as a concise answer to the question, "Why should we care about the copyright wars, anyway?"
The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made.
Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you’re not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you’ve violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement.
There’s a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture.
Culture’s old. It’s older than copyright.
Malformed link to the boingboing version.
Thanks, fixed.
I think Cory is exactly wrong in his history and justification of copyright. There was no such thing as copyright back in the days when copies were expensive. If you were a scribe for Ptolomy, you didn’t worry about copyright, you grabbed books and copied them. It was expensive and only the rich could afford to make copies.
When Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe, copying got dramatically cheaper. It was at THAT point where the right to copy became valuable–because copying itself was cheap. As Cory points out, computers make copying even cheaper. This does not, logically, mean copyright is no longer valuable. Although it probably isn’t automatic to extend the argument to say copyright is even more important now, I think the point could be made.
Bottom line it–it takes time and effort to create and edit digital content. Creators (and editors) who create value should reasonably expect some reward if the content they generate is used and enjoyed by others. Since it’s unlikely that we’ll ever have socialized writers, some other revenue model is needed. Copyright is the basis for the current revenue model. While alternative revenue models have been proposed, and even experimented with (including my own attempt at a ‘shareware’ model, none has yet developed to replace the ‘reader pays’ model–at least in the world of written fiction.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
> There was no such thing as copyright back in the
> days when copies were expensive. […]
> When Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe,
> copying got dramatically cheaper. It was at THAT
> point where the right to copy became valuable–
> because copying itself was cheap.
Obviously Cory was refering to THAT time as the time when the “cost of [the copying] apparatus was significant”.
> computers make copying even cheaper. This does not,
> logically, mean copyright is no longer valuable.
That’s not the point Cory’s making. He’s saying that mass copying has shifted from being done only by the industry to being done by everyone. It’s easy to regulate some industry, but to try to regulate what normal people communicate between themselves is pretty much impossible.
> it takes time and effort to create and edit digital
> content. Creators (and editors) who create value
> should reasonably expect some reward if the content
> they generate is used and enjoyed by others
Sure, but the government should not give the “creators (and editors)” the authority to forbid me to share whatever content I have with anyone I want to share it with in private. Such a law is ineffective when we have the level of communication technology we have today, and trying to enforce such a law would require the abolishment of all private communication. That cost is simply too high for the government supporting a group of professions.
> Since it’s unlikely that we’ll ever have socialized
> writers, some other revenue model is needed.
Huh? There are millions of people creating content nowadays without getting paid for it (at least not directly). I’m sure you can find some narrow field where there are no, or only a few, people creating content for free, but so what?