Finally the RIAA got it. It will stop suing against individual filesharerers (see the Wall Street Journal). As Lawrence Lessig said: This is important progress.
But is the copyright war over? Not yet, there are still a lot of problems to fix.
For all of you who haven`t read the latest book of Lawrence “REMIX” yet, here his latest great talk about his ideas on copyright issues in the digital age.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Yesterday I read an amazing WIRED article! Well… great magazine…. but this one was from 1995. Remember how computers and mobile phones looked in 1995?
The article is about a new way of looking at compensation for owners and creators in the net-based economy. The author, Esther Dyson, predicted in her article all the problems the media industry will be confronted with in more than ten years time cause of digitalisation. She wrote about all the challenges for owners, creators, sellers and users of intellectual property. About the fact that quality content will be free, easy to copy but hard to find. And she made suggestions how content creators can find ways to be paid. The article could have been written last year … and still it would be a great one.
I had never heard about this article before… (sure, I had heard about Esther)
It`s quite a long article … I just wanted to quote a few of the best parts:
“In a new environment, such as the gravity field of the moon, laws of physics play out differently. On the Net, there is an equivalent change in “gravity” brought about by the ease of information transfer. We are entering a new economic environment – as different as the moon is from the earth – where a new set of physical rules will govern what intellectual property means, how opportunities are created from it, who prospers, and who loses.
Chief among the new rules is that “content is free.” While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were. In the world of the Net, content (including software) will serve as advertising for services such as support, aggregation, filtering, assembly and integration of content modules, or training of customers in their use.”
(…)
“I am not saying that content is worthless, or that you will always get it for free. Content providers should manage their businesses as if it were free, and then figure out how to set up relationships or develop ancillary products and services that cover the costs of developing content. (…) The way to become a leading content provider may be to start by giving your content away. This “generosity” isn’t a moral decision: it’s a business strategy.”
(…)
“The definition of the problem, rather than its solution, will be the scarce resource in the future.”
(…)
Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: you need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can’t simply sit back and collect rent. To some, this state of affairs may seem unfair. It certainly is if you grew up by the old rules and don’t want to play in a new game. But if you look at the new rules by themselves, they have a certain moral grounding: people will be rewarded for personal effort – process and services – rather than for mere ownership of assets.”
(…)
“So, what happens in a world where software is basically free? Successful companies are adopting business models in which they are rewarded for services rather than for code. Developers who create software are rewarded for showing users how to use it, for installing systems, for developing customer-specific applications. The real value created by most software companies lies in their distribution networks, trained user bases, and brand names – not in their code.”
(…)
“With the means of production growing cheaper and easier because of the Net, a bifurcation will take place: more and more people will produce material for smaller audiences of their friends, while those seeking large audiences will give their stuff away or seek payment from a sponsor – and try to persuade influencers to recommend it.
In the end, the only unfungible, unreplicable value in the new economy will be people’s presence, time, and attention; to sell that presence, time, and attention out-side their own community, creators will have to give away content for free.”
This was all written 13 years ago!!!
Hopefully, they will.
Here is a good post at TechCrunch on this theme. Tomorrow there will be an announcement on the new rates of music copyright fees for digital music downloads for the next five years.
As always the music publisher are not realistic when it comes to pricing and even want to raise the fee from 9 to 15 cents per track. Apple is not amused and has vaguely threatened that it might have to shut down iTunes if the new rates go into effect.
Now Apple and the record labels are arguing that the rates should be changed from a flat fee per song to a percentage of revenues.
Hopefully Apple will be successful because this is the only chance for realistic pricing anytime soon. It will make it possible to be much more flexible with pricing and to expand the business, which in the long term should be a big benefit for artists.
We will see…
Maybe some of you have heard about it… or already have read the paper… one more interesting argument in the never ending discussion about piracy…
There is a global industry that produces a huge variety of creative goods in markets larger than those for movies, books or music and does so without strong copyright protection. Competition, innovation, and investment, however, remain vibrant. That industry is fashion.
We all know the fashion industry is one of the most creative and innovative industries out there. So fashion firms show precisely the opposite behavior of that predicted by the standard theory of copyrights, which predict extensive copying will destroy the incentive for new innovation.
So why, when major content industries have increasingly powerful copyright protections for their products, does fashion design remain mostly unprotected – and economically successful?
This paradox is analyzed by Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman in the article named: “THE PIRACY PARADOX: INNOVATION AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN FASHION DESIGN” in the Virgina Law Review.
They argue that the fashion industry counter-intuitively operates within a low-copyright equilibrium in which copying does not deter innovation and may actually promote it. The paper offers a model explaining how the fashion industry’s piracy paradox works, and how copying functions as an important element of and perhaps even a necessary predicate to the industry’s swift cycle of innovation.
The paper is quite long (92 pages), but you don`t have to read the whole paper to get the message. Piracy is an issue an industry can deal with under some circumstances…
At a conference of The New Yorker (May 2008 ) Kal Raustiala talked with Scott Hemphill and James Surowiecki about the effect pirated goods have on the fashion industry. See the video here or download the podcast on itunes.
“You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it. Who thinks that might be wrong?”
Great short article from David Pogue in the NYTimes describing an experience of changing consumer behavior on copyright infringements during different of his speeches on copyright. Nice anecdote!
And I fully agree with him:
“I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies’ problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?”
There definitely is a big generational divide in copyright morality. We have to face it.
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