Questioning copyright.
Oct. 20th, 2006 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenI went to an awesome talk about the history of copyright yesterday. It was given by Karl Fogel, the webmaster of QuestionCopyright.org. I think pretty much everything he mentioned is also on the site, but I'll summarize the points I found really interesting, since they're somewhat scattered over the pages:
In the end, I don't think there's anything immediately revolutionary in what I learned, but dispelling the link between plagiarism and infringement is probably the first step towards copyright reform. Obviously all these ideas that infringement is evil hasn't stopped file-sharing and the like, but it probably gives people a lingering guilt over the matter -- they feel like it's wrong, even though they can't quite figure out whom they're hurting. Whatever people thought about the music industry's response to file-sharing, many of them probably felt that it still had the moral high ground. And as long as the public thinks copyrights are fundamentally desirable, there's no impetus for Congress to change the current system.
I'm not a problem-solver, so I couldn't begin to say what should be done. I'm guessing most talks like the one I went to are just preaching to the choir. Even the internet may not be the best vehicle for spreading this kind of information. But it's good to know and to think about, anyway.
- Copyright began as a form of censorship. Britain gave the Guild of Stationers a monopoly on printing presses so that government censors could control what was being published. When they lost their monopoly, the Guild presented Parliament with the idea that artists have a natural right in their works and can transfer this right by contract, with the goal of retaining their own exclusive rights. From the start, copyrights have been advocated by and designed to protect the publishers, not the artists.
- Most people think copyrights are designed to protect artists from plagiarism, i.e. from losing credit, not revenue. (And groups like the RIAA work hard to reinforce this link between copyright infringement and plagiarism, since the latter carries a huge stigma, even among children.) But plagiarism isn't the problem with things like file-sharing.
Actually, there are some crediting problems with file-sharing, such as mistagged songs, but I don't think that's really high in anyone's consciousness when they talk about the issue. - The vast majority of artists don't depend on their copyrights to make money. Most music artists make money by performing. Writers get advances. The royalties these people get, if they get them, are usually tiny.
In the end, I don't think there's anything immediately revolutionary in what I learned, but dispelling the link between plagiarism and infringement is probably the first step towards copyright reform. Obviously all these ideas that infringement is evil hasn't stopped file-sharing and the like, but it probably gives people a lingering guilt over the matter -- they feel like it's wrong, even though they can't quite figure out whom they're hurting. Whatever people thought about the music industry's response to file-sharing, many of them probably felt that it still had the moral high ground. And as long as the public thinks copyrights are fundamentally desirable, there's no impetus for Congress to change the current system.
I'm not a problem-solver, so I couldn't begin to say what should be done. I'm guessing most talks like the one I went to are just preaching to the choir. Even the internet may not be the best vehicle for spreading this kind of information. But it's good to know and to think about, anyway.
