May 4, 2010

• After Copyright

  Copyright law is the wrong solution to the right problem.

  The problem is that artists need to be paid for creating art. It totally should be possible for a popular artist to make a decent living either partially or completely through the act of creating art works that people enjoy and utilize. That’s the right problem. That’s totally what we as society should be focused upon. Copyright solves that problem… sort of.

  It is an enormously flawed solution in many ways. Nor, do I believe, can it ever be fixed to the point where it can solve this problem well. Hence, what we call copyright today is ultimately doomed. Why would that be?

  Copyright was designed to solve a problem of content distribution in an era where creating copies of content was a slow and arduous process. We didn’t need to regulate most generation of “copies” because they were either innocuous (fair use) or it was so prohibitively expensive in time and energy to create the copies that doing so was so rare it wouldn’t really strongly interfere with the major content producer’s ability to make a profit.

  Today, thinks are radically different. Copy generation is cheap to the point that it is trivial. Every computer view of well anything generates a copy instantly which you can capture and do with as you please.  Indeed, in truth when you view something over the web, numerous unauthorized copies are being generated all along the path of distribution. People can make and share copies of songs and videos at light speed. They can alter those copies, adjust them, change them, merge them with near the speed of thought.

  But it’s not really today that you really have to worry about for copyright law. Imagine the future. Imagine an era where bandwidth and storage are a thousand times or a million times what it is now.  Imagine an era where everyone can contain the whole of human generated content on their own cell phone’s hard drive. Imagine you can give that knowledge to anyone else anywhere in the world in an instant.

  Imagine also that you can capture information with similar ease and add it to that store? You can in effect simply point your cell phone at a book and scan its entire content into a digital format in a second. You can point it at a television and record whatever is playing it with perfect quality and with a few taps you can instantly remove commercials. You can record conversations,  music, take pictures all rapidly into a format of near life-like realism.

  Surely we can see that in a world like that, copyright cannot be enforced. If even one person rejects the social contract that requires people to pay for content then effectively everyone has instant access to all the content that person acquires in violation of copyright law. And we know from human nature and from experience it won’t be just one person. Lots and lots of people are willing to break this contract whether it be out of greed or need. In effect there would be an inherent social disadvantage to playing by the rules. Your experience of culture and ability to experiment with culture would be radically reduced relevant to everyone else due to your adherence to your honor. Competitive forces will soon take over.

  Now copyright people try to solve this problem by crippling these two constantly growing areas of technology. Bandwidth and Data Capture. On bandwidth they launch an attack on net neutrality to try and give major companies the right to charge different prices for different content. If they can do that then there will be little need to expand the size or scope of bandwidth access. They can stop at a level that strikes them as good enough and simply charge more for the highest demand content. Indeed it would be in their best interest NOT to maximize bandwidth since it would be the scarce resource on which they base their profit.

  For data capture the solution has been the vaunted DRM. The idea is that at the point of capture, information can be encoded or encrypted in such a way that it effectively can’t be “copied” or so that it phones home to let the content producer know when an unauthorized copy has been made so legal actions can be taken. Basically this attempts to cripple what users can do with content. Which means you can’t transfer it to different devices, can’t share it easily with friends to discuss and interact, and if DRM were capable of achieving its ideal you wouldn’t be able to mix and match up content to create new works based on copies of existing work.

  But the overarching flow of technology will eventually overwhelm these two solutions too. We already see DRM suffering hugely. Streaming services make it possible to share “copies” in such a way that people don’t feel like they are violating copyright law and which get around possible drm.  And people general outrage at the idea of not being able to use content that they paid for as they please has lead companies to be wary even of attempting to DRM their works.

  Even if DRM were popular, it is a hackish solution at best. It would still be very easy to effectively record anything you perceive online into another DRM-free format. And even if someone how you could prevent that by building into every content capturing device an auto-drming feature, if bandwidth were high enough everyone could effectively make their own, albeit drm-ed, copies instantly for free with minimal effort for anything they perceive. In effect DRM would be useless.

  Bandwidth is the much harder problem but I think the growing needs of technology will naturally require more and more bandwidth. People have an inherent thirst for it. Technology companies desperately need it. That’s why they vociferously lobby against attempts to restrict network neutrality. And there are competitive forces at work here too. A country or region with a better bandwidth infrastructure has a competitive advantage over other countries. In effect their children get exposed to more culture and more knowledge faster and can learn more rapidly than the people in societies that have limited bandwidth. In effect whenever a new creative popular idea that uses tons of bandwidth appears, demand for greater bandwidth will increase.

  So I reiterate my original prediction. In the end… copyright in its current form is doomed. As technology improves it will become increasingly prohibitively expensive to try and police the creation of “copies”.  Actually its already prohibitively expensive as evidence by the utter lack of effective enforcement of copy generation that exists today. You can get pretty much anything online for free and it doesn’t even require you to be particularly tech savvy to do it. Really I think the only reason copyright has been able to persist is that people implicitly understand that if copyright disappears we’ll have a big gaping hole in which the question of how creative content producers get paid for their work. Hence it’s more social agreement that makes us give a slight nod to respect copyright law despite its weak nature.  But note that that agreement only goes so far. People are somewhat willing to buy mp3s from itunes for example, but people utterly reject the idea that they can’t splice and edit video and audio into new creative video and audio works. And like I explained earlier people aren’t particularly  fond even of audio files they can’t transfer (copy) from one device to another.

  Ironically what’s really helping copyright survive right now is the good will of the people. That and the short term necessity of aggregate sites like youtube which have both the storage size and bandwidth that regular users currently lack. Those sites serve as lightning rods for copyright law enforcement creating a false sense of copyright enforcement viability that really only exists in the short term.

  OK so what happens if I’m right and copyright does die? 

  Well the cynical dark interpretation is that people would just stop producing creative content. But that’s just plain idiotic. It’s human nature to generate arts.  People will do it no matter what.  But it’s entirely possible that big budget arts that earn a lot of money would become utterly impossible. You’d have to make your money through other means and that means working other jobs, using excessive advertisement revenue, or doing things outside of the online world entirely. So for example holding concerts is still a viable way for a musician to earn money. Selling an experience like at a movie theater could conceivably be a way for movies to continue to make money, well at least until home theater experience becomes nearly equivalent to movie theater experience.  People would find creative ways. But overall the arts on a whole would see a reduction in its profitability just by virtue of the one sale to one person model for content being utterly broken.

  That’s not, in my opinion, necessarily a bad thing. It could make artists more independent as there would no longer be any huge benefit of being connected to a big distributor, publisher, label, or producer. It could also reduce the “group think” mentality that arises in big budget projects that tend to try and sell to the lowest common denominator in order to maximize the number of people who experience a work.  Edgier art might thrive. More unique art might thrive.

  But the life of most of the artists would be extraordinarily more crappy.

  Worse there’s be less of a dream/hope element of art driving more people to be creative. You wouldn’t have much reason to hope to be that super famous rich musician. At best you could be super famous online but still have to work at Burger King to supplement your art income so you can raise your kids. How much would that reduce the amount of creative people who ever develop the will to even enter into the field? The lack of job security in the arts is a huge a problem today, it would be immeasurably worse if there were no concept of copyright at all and with nothing to replace it. If you have the choice between devoting all your effort to getting a secure job as a businessman or following your passion of art and ending up broke, some will choose the business route just out of a sheer sense of necessity and fear of what the alternative might lead.

  Fortunately there are other solutions.  We don’t necessarily NEED copyright in order to ensure that content producers get paid. In fact it’s a really clunky and bad solution. We can, as a society come up with much better ones.

  The best way I think would be to treat the internet as a kind of massive shared global library. That’s how it really works anyway. As such there shouldn’t be a cost to consumme material within the library. Your mere membership in the library gives you the privilege to effectively make as many copies of the content within as you want, AND to contribute copies of your own work to the global library.

  So where does the money come in?  Why in advance. It should be that you pay for the access to the library. In effect similar to how we support libraries today, by maybe paying a fee for a library card and through our taxes. You pay in advance a regular amount to have access and then you have simple overarching access. No restrictions. No limits.

  In the internet example it would effectively be a cost you have to pay to get online. One online you get all the tools needed to be online and contribute to the online community experience.  One way to do that is through taxes on the tools needed to get online. IE a tax on bandwidth, a tax on computer equipment. Those however are not ideal since they punish people for getting online which is exactly what we DON’T want to do. We want to encourage as many people as possible to be online to enrich the library.  A better plan would be an entirely separate creative-content tax. That is, everyone in the society pays this tax just like they pay income tax or payroll taxes. It needs to be progressive or subsidized so that low income people don’t have to pay at all. Higher and middle income people however I think it would be reasonable for it be flat for. I mean really being richer doesn’t really translate into a greater appreciation or need for the arts than a middle class person.

  So the way I see it is you’d have something like, for anyone making over 50K, there’s like a $200/month flat tax for enjoying the arts online.  In effect this is the cost for making all art experienced online free. I’m just making up those numbers, it could be anything. You’d actually have to compute how much is needed to reasonably support the arts so that artists can get reasonable salaries.

  Next the question becomes how do these taxes translate into money for artists?  Here’s where modern technology makes things fun.  It should remain a real competitive system. That’s really essential for art to thrive. Not just anybody who puts content on the web should be entitled to an equal share of the money collected for content producers.  No, what is needed is a system that works almost exactly like Youtube.  In effect you need to be able to mark a piece of content as “liked”. Those “liked” entries of the art all get a proportion of the money that you contributed in taxes that month at the end of the month divided evenly.  So, again with the $200 tax, if there are 4 bloggers who I think are making excellent works this month, I should be able to like them all and each would get $50 by the end of the month added to their salary.   If one blogger wrote two entries you appreciated, and the other 3 only wrote one, then the one blogger would get $80 and the rest would get $40.

  As you can see with a lot of people involved in this system there’d be a lot of money spread around. And a person who is really popular can possible earn a considerable amount of money. It encourages EVERYONE to produce content through blogs, forums, video sites, or whatever since there’s a chance that people will mod-up your work giving you a nice little salary for your work.  For most people it would be chump change, at most enough to offset partially the tax that you had to pay. But the popular people could earn enough to not have to work at some other unpleasant job. And for some it would even be possible to mass considerable wealth

  A system like this encourages quantity, variety, AND quality of content. It rewards people who interact with different communities because you want more and more people to see and possibly mod-up your works. Hence you’d be rewarded for being a person who makes videos, writes books, writes articles, makes comics, makes music, creates paintings, writes programs, and writes blogs. Hence the modern renaissance man or woman would thrive in a system like this.

  It also encourages the YOUNG to produce and the POOR to produce content. Why? Because they don’t pay into the system (if you don’t have income high enough you don’t pay)  but they can still get money out of it. So if you lose your job one way you can help stay afloat for a while is to blog a lot while you are looking for work.

  It could also be a very nice convenient way for people to help their friends out who have come across a spill of bad luck.  Say if your friend you know is really down on their luck you could during the months they are having hardship just mod their works up and nothing else. If effect you’d be giving them $200 every month to help them out, but it’s $200 you can’t spend on anything anyway.

  You’d could also have ways to subscribe to certain people’s content that you like. So you could specify that this producer you want to always be modded up by you every month. It’s even viable to have the ability to specify that this producer will always get $10 or $20 of your content money every month and all other people you mod up will get the rest of your money split amongst them. That would make subscriptions sort of the holy grail for people aiming for the big bucks since that’s a guaranteed income flow.

  If you don’t spend the money for a given month, that is you don’t mod anyone, I believe it could be split up amongst the remaining months of the year.  So say you don’t see any content you consider worthwhile in February, then for the remaining months the amount you provide for each Like mod is a fraction of $220 instead of $200.  If at the end of the year you haven’t spent any money, that money could possibly go into a fund for the state giving creative grants or lump sum awards to people who demonstrate exemplary success in the arts. Those awards or grants should be awarded in some kind of at least partially democratic way though otherwise they’d become a farce.

  All of this would of course be supplemental income to those who have ways to generate income offline which would still be governed by old school laws such as copyright law or just plain laws of physics. So if people still want to buy a physical book from someone they totally could and that person would still get the revenue for it. However once that book is translated online then the income it generates online would be governed by the rules of the content system I described here.

  This is not really my idea and it’s not revolutionary. A lot of people have theorized similar micro-payment systems to deal with the problem of funding the arts in the post internet world.  There’s at least one company that is actually already implementing it at least in a beta stage. It’s called flattr.  You can learn more about it by watching the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwvExIWf_Uc

  Even with a system like this there’d still be problems to work out. Social questions would still be relevant.  For example a simple problem is say you wrote a book that you sold offline and you created an online version of it with a mod-up button in accordance with the law.  Now imagine hundreds of people who bought your book in the physical world scan your book and put it online with their own mod-up buttons in hopes of stealing some of your revenue.  How can you identify that the core creative work there is yours and that you should be entitled to the bulk of the online viewership compensation? And indeed should you get all or most of the compensation? It could very well be that those who uploaded your book and featured it on their blogs or social networks radically increased the viewership of your book beyond what it would otherwise have gotten increasing your mod ups. Should they be partially compensated for that advertisement?

  Thinking through it I should think that there’d need to be a way for users to flag content as containing other content and match it up with its originating source. Then I think a modup for that work would count as a mod up for the originating source AND for the advertiser source.  In effect splitting the money one more way. But users who don’t want to mod the person who created the copy can follow the link created by the flag back to the originator’s site and mod up that one alone. Hence if you advertise someone else’s work that is good you increase the likelihood of your earning money while at the same time considerably increasing that person you are advertising’s likelihood of earning money. Viral propagation remains preserved! But at the same time, there’s a greater incentive for you to generate your own original content that itself gets popular since then you don’t have to share the revenue of the like-mods.

  The last problem would be if content is really a complex mish mash of different works edited together. Should the original content producers gain any money from those? I’d  answer that simply as no.  I think good mixes are themselves valuable pieces of art that should be rated on their own. And I think bad mixes just won’t get a lot of mod points anyway so it’s not worth worrying about. I think it’s one of the great horrors of copyright law that it tries to make people who mix and mash works financially obligated to the originators of all components of their works. That just stifles creative content generation.

  I do think content producers should be able to specify if they don’t want to allow others to be allowed to create derivative works. In that case then a flagging system could then be applied as well. If someone’s work is flagged as a derivative of an unallowed work then someone could check into that and if verified some sort of resolution process could begin. It could be a legal process or something just so simple as that work will get Zero-mod points hence making the creator have little or no financial incentive to keep the derivative work up.

  It’s not a perfect system but I think it would be far easier to enforce than current copyright laws and could scale effectively with growth in technology.  It would promote both the creation and the appreciation of the arts in ways copyright simply is incapable of doing in the digital world.

  That’s the kind of system I’d like to see the world head toward after Copyright falls rather than hodgepodge clunky attempts to fix and fit copyright to the digital era that turn the bulk of citizens into criminals.

  • 7:05 pm
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