The iRacing thread just got my mind going a bit on the topic of copyright (and "IP" in general) and I thought it would be interesting to gauge the popular opinion on the subject...

To cut right to the chase, I'm getting more and more convinced the whole concept of copyright is a dead end and that it will eventually disappear. More importantly I'm convinced this won't really hurt most of the creative people making a living "because of" copyright, like programmers, musicians etc. Let me explain why.

If you look at copyrighted material through the goggles of free market capitalism, the product itself (a piece of music or a program) has infinite supply. Once the initial copy is created and the costs of creating that copy are paid you can create any number of copies from the original at no additional cost. This makes the total cost of all copies trend towards 0.

The only reason a music file or a program has any value at all is because we have laws in place which artificially give them value - copyright. This worked more or less okay back in the days when copying a book or a piece of music was rather expensive and time consuming in and of itself, but with the advent of computers and the internet this expense has all but disappeared. While copying a piece of music tape to tape like in the "old" days took some time, effort and money (an empty tape at the very least), copying it now is done in seconds through Bittorrent at virtually no cost. And so, the amount of copyright infringement has sky-rocketed.

Now you have two choices, keep copyright the way it is and use extreme amounts of time, effort and money to try to keep the "market" from doing what comes naturally (The RIAA/MPAA approach), or you just drop the whole concept and try to find alternate ways to make money within this new system and with this new technology.

For a musician that would be the good old live show. People may be able to download your record, if you have one, but they won't be able to download the experience of seeing you live. Nor will they be able to download your merchandise. There's a lot of money to be made there and copyright is not important at all to keep this money flowing, quite the opposite.

If your recorded music is free you may reach a much larger audience than would be otherwise possible and if you're good your reputation will build purely through word of mouth. This means more people come to your live shows and more people buy your merchandise. There are already artists out there doing something very similar to this, and they are able to make a comfortable living that way. Will they become hugely popular multi-millionaires like many of the stars of today? Most likely not, but they'll get by, and so will many, many others like them. I find it much more appealing to have a huge creative community alive and thriving, than a few filthy rich super-stars and their managers that get all the cash.

For a programmer it's a bit different of course, since few would pay to see live programming on stage, but it's still possible to make money in the absence of copyright. I'm living proof of that. As a web-developer I program and configure web-sites for my customers and I can honestly say my "ownership" of the code I produce means absolutely nothing to me. I'm not hired because of the code I own, I'm hired because I have skills the people hiring me don't. They aren't able to create a good web-site, so they hire me to do it for them.

Furthermore the fact that the code I produce is effectively public domain means that the amount of time and effort spent reinventing something others have done before can be limited. Instead of doing every project from scratch or paying license fees for existing products to base my stuff on, I can just modify some existing code and get stuff done in half the time. This means less cost for the people hiring me to do some work for them, which is good for the economy as a whole.

Of course the loss of copyright would hurt for a lot of businesses currently thriving on selling software licenses and a lot of existing jobs would be lost, but at the same time a lot of new possibilities would open up in customising existing software and the savings the rest of the economy would have on software spending would be extremely beneficial. In my view that's an overall win.

Now, I'm not deluded enough to think removing copyright over night wouldn't create chaos and mayhem in the various industries and hurt a lot of people in the process, but I do think that's where we eventually have to end up; will end up. The current system just isn't working and we're wasting way too much time and effort trying to patch it back to a working state. We need to face the realities and adapt to them.

If anyone made it all the way down here (thank you by the way ), I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject. I'd love nothing more that to be proven wrong if you can find some obvious flaws in my reasoning.

Wasn't it REM who had their album on their site, but you "pay what you want"? I think that's the first step towards getting rid of these copyrights, because as you say, it's an incentive to break it. I can't see any flaws in your reasoning, apart form the obvious fat cats (ahem...Sony) who will never abolish copyright completely...not like they wouldn't make enough without it

That was Radiohead Dougie

Quote from The General Lee :

That was Radiohead Dougie

Ah, they're all the same

Copyright allows us to have things we cant have without it. For instance I can make money by writing a computer game with a monthly subscription, it's pretty foolproof as copy protection goes.

However the subscription model doesnt work for all types of computer game and there is definately still a market for games that are not subscriber based.

Where your argument falls over is that where there is a market you will usually find demand, and some markets just cannot be adopted to a model that works in a world free of copyright.

I think there is a definite change in the way IP is secured and enforced, and certainly many industries will change such as music. However I dont think we'll see an end to intellectual property rights for a long time yet.

I for one am thankfull of that, because I make my day job living off my work being protected by copyright and patent.

Your business model is a good one Becky, it's just that many people are still in the 20th century. In Kiwiland, it was only three weeks ago that we've been allowed legally to format shift for music, before then it was a breach of copyright. ( Yeah, like no one did that !!! ) And it's still a breach of OUR copyright law to format shift movies or games.

Unless the law ( and more to the financial point ) people's business models keep up with the real world, then copyright is a distant joke.
Radioheads idea is great, and that's the way more and more muso's are going.

In fact, at least here, you can make far more money this way than you can with a deal with a label. I personally know a number of musicians who are doing internet releases, and by doing this, supported by playing live, are finally starting to make some money.

Copyright is an interesting area, with almost as many views as people. Matt & Trey ( South Park ) believe that it's just a joke and encourage everyone to download South Park. Doesn't seem to have hurt their earnings .........

As Becky says, it would be pretty hard for someone writing a piece of code (such as a game) from scratch, to live in a world without copyright. Modifying or tweaking some existing code and selling it cheap may work for some things, but on the other hand the product choices available to people will inevitably end up even more homogenised (1001 doom clones).

Having said that, I can think of other examples- ie. the music industry, which has already been doing this for years. How many songs do you know which sound just like other songs? There's very rarely anything around which is genuinely worth copyrighting, because most stuff is already ripped off from somewhere else anyway.

Is strange territory, creativity's worth. I'm glad I'm not a lawyer.

How about the obvious cases - of a book, or movie? Somebody spends years, researching a book (or drawing illustrations, and such) - or millions of dollars, producing a movie (and paying the participants) - and then the book, or movie, is placed on the internet (or otherwise distributed by someone who did not create it, and has no rights to distribute it), and it becomes available with no compensation for the creator.

Copyright (and patent) laws exist, for the intended purpose of encouraging people to produce creative works, by ensuring that they can expect to benefit from their efforts. If people cannot expect to benefit from their efforts, then why would they be expected to spend all the time, effort and money, to produce creative works? We would all lose, if creative people didn't produce intellectual works. Creating art (in its various forms, including what may be characterized as simply an "intellectual product") is a professional occupation for many persons, in an advanced civilization; if it could not be a professional occupation, it is unlikely that such products would exist (at least to the extent of being products of noteworthy quality).

I would add, btw, that I am familiar with a recent (within the last few months) report that it does, indeed, seem to be a recent trend, that live performances are tending toward becoming a more lucrative activity for popular musicians, than the activity of producing recorded music.

However, I wonder how pleasant a trend this might actually become, if recorded music is henceforth to be regarded as merely advertising for musicians' concerts. I like having good, recorded music, and being able to listen to it, anytime I want, and its being repeatedly enjoyable.

I am also aware that recording technology is much more easily accessible, than had previously been the case, when there were only expensive recording studios and their equipment, available. But I also know that, in those old days, there was quite a lot of innovation and creativity in recording, with various, unusual sources of sounds and interesting techniques for processing sounds; recorded music was, in some cases, a unique art form in itself.

Overall, a continued interest in producing good, recorded music, is desirable. Concerts are enjoyable, too; but the sound quality, or ability to observe, is not always optimal (and these days, concert tickets can be awfully expensive, not to mention the effort of getting there, parking, getting searched for weapons or whatever, dealing with raucous crowds, thrown or spilled drinks, etc.). And what I especially like about concerts, is being able to observe the skill of the instrumentalists; I'm not sure that I would find it so enjoyable, merely to see someone stand around and operate an electronic playback device, assuming that some creative innovation had gone into producing a recorded sound, to be reproduced onstage - an alternative would perhaps be no such innovation in sound production, such as would be useful for a recording, but not for a stage show.

Anyway, the point is that I like recorded music, and if it were of little concern to musicians, except as a way to inspire people to buy concert tickets, then I wonder if its quality would tend to be such as to make it worthwhile having (even if it were free). I also like the idea of inexpensive, recorded music; and it's nice that musicians are finding their way of adapting to a tendency toward copyright infringement, while still making a good living and producing good music. But I tend to doubt that there would likely continue to be good, recorded music, if it were all to be provided without any expectation of payment to those who create it. I have yet to encounter an advertisement that I would want to keep.

Quote from David33 :

I would add, btw, that I am familiar with a recent (within the last few months) report that it does, indeed, seem to be a recent trend, that live performances are tending toward becoming a more lucrative activity for popular musicians, than the activity of producing recorded music.

This trend isn't recent. Musicians have always made the bulk of their money from touring, while the record companies take the vast majority of record sales profits. It's only recently, actually, that musicians have started to reverse this (e.g., Radiohead and NIN).

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

This trend isn't recent. Musicians have always made the bulk of their money from touring, while the record companies take the vast majority of record sales profits.

Not only that - there are musicians out there that make money only by playing gigs; that is definitely not something new, it goes back as far as musicians go as a profession. You'll be surprised how many musicians don't really care about having recordings done.

There are many industries that will need to reinvent themselves soon. The music industry is learning the hard way but the film and software industries will go through the same real soon. I write software for a living and have sold software in the past but can see the days of selling software are all but gone. The trouble being that in the digital domain reproduction costs are zero and distribution is so near zero you treat as zero. Software sales are further effected by the FOSS movement, chances are a free version of anything you can think of are out there.

The only reason the console market is not so effected yet is their tight control and DRM systems they have in place. Trouble is all DRM falls as consoles as mod chips show. It was also that XBox HD DVD drive that broke the DRM on HDDVD and BlueRay

I can't see the answer. People like Trent Reznor of NIN are looking for answers and worth keeping an eye on even if you do not like his music. He is not scared to try new options, even giving away music free.

When you look back to Napster you see how stupid the record industry was, it was the perfect solution for them but they crushed it and with it control over music in the internet age.

At the time the ONLY place to go for music was Napster. It was centralised and so could produce an accurate log of download counts. Before the industry crushed Napster the heads of the 4 majors met with Napster to work a deal. On the lines of $5-$10/month and all music free. They would be able to count downloads on a per user basis and so do a fair distribute of royalties. They would also control over distribution, the decentralised p2p network would probably not have gained ground as the legal offering would have been attractive enough.

DivX and fat pipes have now made movies easy to shunt around now, hence the need for Hi-Def film. It is all about moving distribution costs away from zero so they can charge for product.

The trouble the record industry can't ever get back to Napster, those days are long gone so they have a hard sell and a generation where music=free.

iTunes is really the only current solution for musicians, however there are other business models that show promise. Time will tell if they'll work or not.
Software is trickier thou, LFS has a model that works, other software is harder to market if you can't do a limited demo, then as there's so much freeware out there there's no reason to buy most software.
In my opinion, you need to specialise, focus on a niche and market to that. Personally, I find it easier selling expert labour, as well as selling solutions. There's money in this, many companies want a workable solution to provide their requirements and if they can get this then they'll pay for it.
The internet has created a new marketing system that people still need to learn. The old systems really are dead.

The music industry's greatest failing is in losing hearts and minds. They did that a long time ago, when they laughed audibly as they squeezed excessive, immoral quantities of cash from music fans.. the high price of vinyl was already upsetting "the people" when the CD came along.. and then they really began to take the piss. The music cartel and their copyright monopolies were never legal, but they ducked and dived.. they were "untouchable". Or so they thought.

They never saw the MP3 coming. It got 'em good. They tried to fight back with the RIAA and other initiatives, but the stories of 14-year-olds being sued millions did nothing for their image. They'd lost hearts and minds years before, but they were never truly despised by anyone except the politically/legally acute, until that point.

These days, artists do well to disassociate themselves from the "recording industry". It's important to remember that, while many artists have been made rich by fame, many more have been literally enslaved by their recording contracts. This is not an Artist vs. Public battleground.. it's a Music vs. Industry war.

Never mix business with art? Perhaps.