The dominant discourse pushed by producers is that intellectual property supports creativity and innovation by giving income to those who dedicate themselves. The corresponding assumption that some artists are more successful than others on the basis of quality underestimates the influence of marketing and public exposure. In reality, content as property enforces a status quo.
Content as Product
According to Lessig (2005, p. 66-79), piracy is wrong when it reduces the income of artists and goes on to suggest that the law needs to change as technology does because technology creates new opportunities for people to experience their culture. Lessig argues for a state of balance between producer and consumer access through limitations to copyright. But how then should copyright be enforced?
While it might be possible to enforce public exhibition of content in public places, as illustrated by Stehbens & Fisher (2006), the private use of content has traditionally drawn on the restrictions of mass (CD's, paper, video tape etc.).
The first solution has been to denounce and shut down the online circulation. The media appears to treat this as similar to a police crackdown. Primedia (2006) specifically draws attention to the guilty by association by opening the article with the legal pursuit of search engines and Riley (2006) titles the article “Recording TV no longer a crime”, which serves to suggest the normalcy of piracy. Moses (2006) argues that infringement corresponds with customer dissatisfaction by claiming that the motive for downloading television corresponds to sloppy scheduling.
The second solution, according to Doctorow (2006), has been Digital Rights Management (or D.R.M.) systems which use closed source encoding to disable the widespread copying and or certain uses for that content.
McBride (2006) provides an interesting example of how industry stands to benefit from file-sharing technology with the plan by Warner Brothers to use BitTorrent to transfer the content at a faster pace than a centralized server, and operating on the basis of selling content cheaply with anti-piracy encoding. This implies, along with other discourses about iTunes, that industry is not anti-technology.
The problem of intellectual property, thus, is that in order for content to be a product at all, there needs to be exclusivity in its distribution. Once the product leaves its manufacturer, what rights should the individual have to that content?
Consider the different ways that Riley (2006) from The Australian and Skatssoon (2006) from ABC News Online treat the same news about recent copyright reform plans. While the former places an emphasis on the consumer interest in content (presumably as people who only want to copy for personal use), the latter draws attention to limitations placed on creators who seek to share and manipulate content.
Article comments
1 - methuselah
There are several flaws in current copyright laws, the result of an incremental creep toward monopoly control thru the efforts of corporations large enough to pay the high rates of lobbyists with good connections in compliant federal government.
1-the putative purpose of copyrights is to protect the intellectual, time and money investment of artists, partly to reward them for their efforts and partly to encourage successful artists to create more works, financed thru the royalty proceeds from earlier creations. This would be a reasonable plan, and it had worked in the past, protecting artists from exploitation by malevolent copying businesses and, to a lesser extent, casual pilfering by end-users. But this system was defeated by the great efficiency of large businesses that succeeded in discounting the future profits of artists by contracting them very early in their careers so that the corp would get the royalties and the artists would basically get day-wages for their efforts. The best known example of this is the rock music industry in which a $15 CD nets the artist less than a dollar. Where the recording company didn't have a prior contract with which to discount the artists earnings and capture it for themselves, they simply ignored the artist or used legal force and the superiority of resources to overwhelm the artist. Not only that, but as the royalty reward to authors of songs began, through enforcement, to produce revenue, unscrupulous individuals insisted that they be listed as co-authors to songs though they had cntributed nought to the composition. This was done under threat of exercising monopoly access to markets to browbeat artists into acquiescence.
2-copyright durations have been egregiously extended by a federal congress submissive to the demands of corporations eager to extend their de-facto monopolies far beyond the short time originally allocated to allow an artist to recoup his investment and make a reasonable profit.
3-the civil courts have shown consistent favoritism toward the Goliath companes against the David artists, either by outright findings against artists, or by allowing delaying tactics that had the same result: justice delayed is justice denied. Perhaps the judicial principle here is the belief that it is safer to harm a little artist with a wrong ruling than to harm a big company, many of whose stakeholders may be harmed.
2 - chancelucky
Jonathan,
I agree with your basic point. The operative word in "copyright" seems to be "copy" and technology has made copying so easy that the technology of enforcement really can't cope.
The Japanese system of declaring certain individuals "national treasures", encouraging them to teach+share their art/craft with others and also guaranteeing the master a comfortable living may make as much sense as anything these days.
As you point out, academic tenure works that way in some ways, but it also generally forces these individuals to teach which often can be a different skill entirely.