So in order for copyright to exist in the 21st century, it must be impossible for us to instruct computers to do anything. They must own our computers. They must ensure computers obey them so that they can make it refuse to copy data without approval. We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model.
So in this matter it really is us or them. Either the copyright industry loses, or we lose computing freedom and everything hackers stand for will be history. There's also the looming threat of government encryption regulation which faces the exact same problem. I say computers and the internet are jewels of humanity and too important to be compromised by these governments and stakeholders, and I'd sacrifice a thousand copyright industries to keep them alive and free.
This is not true. It could be enforced by courts and not by computers.
Courts are slower and more expensive, so they'll only be used for the most egregious violations. But that's fine. Those are the high value ones. You wrote some code or made a movie, Netflix wants to use it, Netflix has to pay you for it. Because Netflix is big and you can sue them.
> We cannot be allowed any control because we can easily subvert their business model.
The assumption here is that everybody wants to subvert their business model. For the RIAA that might be true, but we don't need the RIAA. They can lose. Specifically because they're crooks and nobody respects them.
But already right now I can find basically the entire Netflix catalog on BitTorrent sites, and still I pay them.
And look at Substack. You have people making content, the readers respect the writers, so they pay. In many cases even when the articles are available without paying or after only a short delay. Because the readers know they won't be created if the creator has to go dig ditches instead for money.
We should get rid of DMCA 1201 (prohibiting circumvention of DRM). We don't need to get rid of the law that prevents Google News from hosting the full articles on their own servers while stripping out the subscription links.
No, this doesn't get you through the century with copyright intact. Bandwidth and storage only get cheaper, and copyright-able files are not getting proportionally larger.
Eventually--and the 21st century does seem like a reasonable timeframe--something like Google Glass is going to become the norm, for all people, all of the time. Somehow or other we will patch the imperfections of memory and information exchange; think of it like recording everything you see and hear and being able to instantly share those recordings with those around you. We can already do this with a sentence or two of text or the gist of a melody! In the future it'll be a full book, or a song. It's no different from inventing vehicles that allow us to travel at hundreds of miles per hour.
What does copyright look like as the ease of recording and repeating an experience increases at the rate of the past few decades? If technology is in reach that would blur the line between "recording" and "remembering", and "recounting" and "copying", are we going to just say "no" to it? Allow our memories and communication skills to remain in their ancestral, imperfect state just because it is imperative that those who "own" certain bitstreams be paid whenever they reach a new consciousness?
Human courts can't enforce copyright when faced 2050's technology. Not when we can "memorize" and "repeat" everything we hear with the same ease that we memorize or repeat a haiku today.
We're already at the point where these costs are negligibly low. It takes more effort to think about the cost of transferring the text of a book over the internet than the actual cost of doing so. That's not what it's about.
> think of it like recording everything you see and hear and being able to instantly share those recordings with those around you.
If you're the one recording it, you are (in general) the copyright holder. If you're the copyright holder, you can choose to share it without charging anyone money or placing any restrictions on anything.
> We can already do this with a sentence or two of text or the gist of a melody! In the future it'll be a full book, or a song.
Let's say you're right. So now instead of taking a few days to read a book, it takes a few minutes or seconds. Great, now you can read more books. Which means each book gets read more times. Which means each reader doesn't have to pay as much in order for the author to make the same amount of money.
But if you set the price all the way to zero, how does the author make rent? And then where do the books come from?
Yes there are occasional abuses, unfair YouTube takedowns and crap like this from Google. They must be fought, no argument there. Life will go on.
Not at massive global scales. Not at negligible costs. Not with complete impunity. Not in a way that was accessible to everyone.
You can argue until you're blue in the face that what's happening right now is impossible, but it is happening. Look at the massive investment Amazon, Netflix, Disney, HBO and Apple are putting into streaming video. They are very successful businesses fighting over massive revenue streams. We're 20 years into the post-napster digital online revolution, and this is the way things have worked out.
The arrival of mechanical movable type printing in Europe in the Renaissance introduced the era of mass communication, which permanently altered the structure of society. - Wiki
> photocopiers
A primary obstacle associated with the pre-xerographic copying technologies was the high cost of supplies: a Verifax print required supplies costing US$0.15 in 1969, while a Xerox print could be made for $0.03 including paper and labor. - Wiki
> Not at massive global scales. Not at negligible costs. Not with complete impunity. Not in a way that was accessible to everyone.
You're trying to split hairs to justify a belief here. It doesn't seem like you're making a compelling case by stringing together conditions that you think are unique to the modern day.
This is an awful, terrible take. We know that intellectual property is much more artificial than pretty much every other type of property right, but we still want governments to enforce copyright and other IP law because it's a good way to make sure that people have a financial incentive to be creative or do R&D.
Copyright needs reform (and many types of DRM need to be banned), but just because you'd gladly sacrifice thousands of industries (how many jobs is that? millions?) to have some ideological purity, it doesn't mean that such a decision would be broadly supported or even in the best interest of society as a whole.
Source: work in copyright, have seen firsthand how shitty IP protections can destroy businesses that produce excellent content.
I have to believe that there must be alternatives. We need better post-copyright business models. This artificial scarcity thing is simply not going to work anymore. At least not without sacrificing everything about computers that make them special.
Maybe crowdfunding where creation is treated as an investment. Maybe patronage where it's treated as a subscription. I really don't know for sure. I just know it can't go on like this.
I think you are headed down the wrong path here. You don’t need to eliminate intellectual property to preserve general purpose computing. You just have to change the guardrails on how IP enforcement works.
They’ve changed many times and they can change again. And it’s way more achievable than ripping copyright out of society entirely.
Every move to make copyright more like property makes copyright less useful for its designated purposes, and more a drain on the public interest. But copyright holders are continually pressing courts and legislators to try make copyright law subservient to property law, and succeeding, incrementally, so case law on copyright has become hard to distinguish from property law. Nowadays copyright lawyers even call themselves "Intellectual Property" lawyers, deliberately trying to obscure the difference.
The consequence is that Copyright, which was once a benefit for the public interest, is now a benefit only for entrenched media companies. Eliminating it would once have been taking away from the public. Now, eliminating it would benefit the public. But, since copyright is now a matter of international treaty, we no longer have, even in principle, the power to eliminate it: treaties override the Constitution.
Frankly, your bias shows and you might have a case of EverythingLooksLikeANailitis. The copyright industry may be "protecting" jobs in some ways, but it's also destroying jobs in others. It's halting progress in so many cases.
You also need to look at who, in practice, is protected by copyright. The grand majority of the money being protected is that of big, rich industries. Even when the Little Guys are protected, it's usually by a bigger company that gets the way bigger cut from it (eg. stock photo and music artists).
A world without copyright is a different one. IP lawyers and copyright enforcers might be out of a job, but it doesn't mean it'd be one without music or art. We'd find a different way to make it work, hopefully a way that doesn't drive the next Aaron Swartz to suicide.
No, I have a case of "I'veSeenWhatHappensWhenCopyrightIsIgnoreditis." A blind man could see that copyright needs serious reforms, but it's absurd to pretend like other systems produce the diversity and scale of works that the current one does.
> You also need to look at who, in practice, is protected by copyright.
Believe it or not, I do every day.
It's crazy that your solution to "small creators get ripped off" is "make ripping them off legal." The actual solution is to reduce the cost of enforcing copyright - right now it takes a court case, which obviously is a nonstarter for anyone who isn't making bank off of their copyright.
> A world without copyright is a different one. IP lawyers and copyright enforcers might be out of a job, but it doesn't mean it'd be one without music or art.
As long as there are humans, there'll be art and music. What there won't be are people who make a living off of it, and we'll rewind to like 300 years ago when the only people who could afford to create art were born rich or willing to find a rich person who'd individually sponsor them. When people have more time to spend on art, they produce better art. I really hope that isn't controversial.
> We'd find a different way to make it work, hopefully a way that doesn't drive the next Aaron Swartz to suicide.
I'd really rather we didn't use a deeply individual instance of suicide as a political talking point. It's kind of tasteless and you can find plenty of examples of suicide for virtually any problem.
Any tort in law also has secondary liability attached to it, and it's generally accepted caselaw that online service providers get secondary liability if someone uses them to infringe. Congress decided that said providers should be able to disclaim that liability if they participate in a notice-and-takedown process; and the EU has gone further and replaced that with a very context-sensitive "best practices" approach that almost certainly will be interpreted as "video sites must have an equivalent to YouTube Content ID".
From an old media perspective, this is crazy. If CBS licenses a TV show that infringes upon a third-party copyright, they cannot disclaim liability by saying it's the licensee's problem. If they could, then you could construct a bunch of LLCs to separate the infringement from the liability. And this is effectively what online services have done: YouTube, for example, gets to automatically[1] recommend you infringing content, and those who have been infringed only have the legal recourse of sending takedown notices.
Getting rid of the takedown system would mean that copyright owners would have to go back to suing individual users, which is both expensive and, IMO, wrong. YouTube gets to own online video and infringe copyright with impunity, because they passed the buck onto individuals that largely cannot afford to pay damages on infringement. If you're a legitimate[2] user of copyright, you can't economically get the infringement to stop or go underground. Furthermore, if you are a copyright troll, this does nothing to stop you; you will still be able to sue individuals and coerce them into settling baseless claims.
The underlying problem is that online platforms want to half-ass copyright. You can decide whether this is because they understand the draw that infringing content provides to them, or if proper enforcement interferes with the FAANG business model of "own the platform and take 30%". Either way, it's a compliance cost. We don't want people just suing individuals, and we don't want people suing online services to the point where any amount of third-party content is too legally perilous to touch. The answer was supposed to be notice-and-takedown, which is designed basically as a way for online service providers to push papers around between copyright owners and users without having to resort to an expensive lawsuit.
However, nobody likes this. Online service providers that try to do things "by the book" wind up with all sorts of legal pitfalls for both themselves and their users. So even the current notice-and-takedown regime in the US has been subverted by private agreement. For example, DMCA 512 requires copyright owners to actively monitor infringements of your work; but YouTube Content ID instead provides a turn-key solution to find infringing work on that platform. It also lets you just monetize the infringements instead of taking them down, which is also a sort of backdoor license for Google. I suspect some sort of similar arrangement is involved with Google Drive, where you can't share files that trip whatever content ID system is involved here.
So even "killing vigilante enforcement" would not be good enough, because Google has already found it lucrative to privilege copyright owners over regular users. You need to specifically regulate these takedown alternatives rather than just getting rid of takedowns.
[0] Technically speaking, a DMCA takedown notice from someone who does not own the copyright to the work in question is legally deficient and can be safely ignored by Google. However, most online service providers do not do a good job of checking.
[1] As per Mavrix v. LiveJournal, the process has to be automatic. Human curation takes you out of your DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is effectively a "willful blindness" requirement, IMO, which is also bad.
[2] As in, you're interested in preventing sharing of newly-published works for a reasonable time frame, rather than keeping an ironclad grip on Steamboat Willie or Super Mario Bros forever.
I am, however, an American tech enthusiast born in the 90s, which means I got exposed to a lot of anticopyright, Creative Commons, Free Software, and Open Source propaganda at a very young age. Of course, my actual positions nowadays are a lot more nuanced than the ones I had decades ago.
Furthermore, I'm involved with software reimplementation[0]. And one constant of that whole field is that it's often unofficial, if not outright adversarial to the original hardware or software. If you aren't being very careful about copyright at every stage of the process, you are liable to get sued with the full force of the law. There's zero leniency with copyright these days, so you either have to be legally untouchable or go deep underground. I chose the former path, which means that I have to know a lot of this shit, even though I'm not a lawyer.
[0] Specifically I am one of the contributors to Ruffle, a Flash Player reimplementation that works in modern web browsers.
