[ NNSquad ] Re: The Darknet: A Digital Copyright Revolution

[Barry Gold <BarryDGold@ca.rr.com>]

Lauren Weinstein wrote:
> Interesting proposed copyright changes.  And about as unlikely to be
> enacted soon in the U.S. as would be Glenn Beck joining the Search
> Quality team at Google.

This set me thinking about the current copyright situation vs. the Net.

The Internet has two _major_  advantages over any previous technology.

The first discovered, back in 1993 with the introduction of the Mosaic 
browser, was that information could be shared freely.  You could find 
out all kinds of things -- yes, including pornography, but the available 
technical and scientific information just kept growing.  Things grew 
rapidly from there: search engines, bulletin boards, specialized 
information sites of all kinds.  Then came Wikis and social networking 
sites.  All of these allow human beings to connect with each other in a 
variety of ways.  The cost (both in money, and in time) to find 
information decreased by orders of magnitude.  The truth is out there... 
if you know how to search for it.  (And, unfortunately, if you know how 
to distinguish truth from lies, because while "all knowledge is 
contained on the net", all misinformation is also on the net.)

Within a couple of years, the second advantage showed itself: the Web 
was also an incredible commercial lubricant.  Yes, many of us who 
remember the early days of the Internet will bemoan the advent of 
commercial exploitation (_most especially_ spam, but also the wide 
variety of commercial stuff that is mixed up with whatever it is you're 
looking for).  Nonetheless, this was a major boon for humanity, and 
especially for the industrialized nations.  Transaction costs decreased. 
 Almost anybody can be "in business" thanks to sites like EBay.

Amazon.com showed how even physical things could be sold cheaper *and 
faster* over the net.  The velocity(*) of money increased.  An economic 
boom resulted: increasing the velocity of money has all the benefits of 
inflating the currency, and almost none of the disadvantages.

But there is one area where transaction costs have *not* decreased: 
Intellectual property.  The _physical embodiment_ of IP can be sold more 
cheaply, just like anything else: you can buy CDs or DVDs over the net, 
and of course those formats are _much_ cheaper to produce than any 
former methods of selling "books", "movies", music, etc.

But if you want to acquire any of the _rights_ to something (other than 
the right to possess and use a particular copy), it is still just as 
difficult as it ever was.  In some ways, it has become _more_ difficult 
to acquire rights than it was 100 years ago.  In 1910, the chances were 
that the rights to a book or piece of music were still owned by the 
author or composer or his/her descendants.  You could write a letter, 
and if your proposal was reasonable and included some money to 
compensate the creator, you had a good chance of getting what you wanted.

Since the 1930s or so, rights have increasingly been owned by large 
corporations.  And while corporations do some things very efficiently, 
they can also be hide-bound.  They are set up to do X (e.g., publish 
books, produce and sell movies), but if you ask them for Y they just 
aren't interested.  From their point of view, it isn't even worth their 
time to _think_ about what you are asking for -- not unless what you 
want to do is _big_ and will make them $millions.  Mere $thousands 
aren't even enough for somebody to consider.

I ran into this in the early 80s.  A friend had written several books 
for Ace Books in _The Man from U.N.C.L.E._ universe.  The last one, _The 
Final Affair_, was delivered late -- after the series ended, and never 
published.  I wrote MGM to try to get permission to publish a limited 
edition.  It took about six rather frustrating months, and the best I 
was able to get out of them was "If you publish a small press edition, 
we'll ignore it."  Not even formal permission, just a wink and a nod, 
and I had to consider myself lucky to get that much.  They didn't even 
want to bother with the royalties from a press run of 500 copies.

AFAIK, things have not improved since then.  Oh, you can get rights -- 
if you're Warner Brothers and have your own team of lawyers to negotiate 
with Disney's lawyers over the use of characters in "Who Framed Roger 
Rabbit."  If you're Joe Schmo, trying to do something small, just forget it.

So the major benefit of the Internet and the Web -- lowered transaction 
costs -- has not come to IP.  And until we find a way to buy and sell 
_rights_ (rather than physical embodiments of rights, including MP3s on 
ITunes), the owners of IP will struggle to control what is theirs (and, 
by rights, it _is_ theirs), while the IP they want to control spreads 
_out_ of control everywhere -- taking it down in one place just ensures 
that it pops up in 5 other places.

The one exception to all this is song "covers": once a song has been 
recorded for sale, anybody can record it, file the forms for a 
"mechanical license", and send in a fixed royalty based on the number of 
copies.  ASCAP and BMI do something similar for live performances: if 
you have a club where people come and sing songs, you just pay ASCAP 
and/or BMI a yearly fee based on the seating in your venue, and don't 
worry about the details.

This type of model is needed for all the ways we distribute IP: movies, 
songs, plays, whatever. You should be able to pay a fee and put it up on 
 your website.  Big players (like YouTube and Hulu) can negotiate this 
kind of thing -- and are doing so.  Little people don't have a chance. 
But the Internet and the WWW are about enabling little people (at least, 
so far), and the big players are going to have to find a solution that 
works for (nearly) everybody.

Otherwise the current mess will continue, and trying to stamp out IP 
theft will be like the War on Drugs -- lots of infringement on 
individual rights for little or no beneficial effect.

(*) This is a technical term used by economists to describe how 
frequently a unit of money is spent.

   [ I'm aware of similar situations where attempts by other than
     large companies to buy or otherwise get legal permission to
     distribute/build upon largely forgotten works are either ignored
     or actively opposed by the major corporate rights holders, even
     though nobody has done anything to make those properties
     available for decades.  In the best of U.N.C.L.E.-eze,
     we could call it "The Twisted Tortuous IP Nightmare Affair":
     http://bit.ly/96T124  (YouTube).  (Dig that Jerry Goldsmith score!)

        -- Lauren Weinstein 
           NNSquad Moderator ]