Copyright is Obsolete

April 22 2009, 12:56am

Copyright was created to provide a way for creators to receive compensation for the sharing of their work. Now that digital copies make it nearly impossible to restrict the free sharing of information, creators need to find a new way to get paid. Various individuals and industries are trying to change this trajectory, but technology progresses much faster than policy, as evidenced by Moore’s law. Entities fighting for strict copyright law are doomed to failure, but ultimately this change will benefit the creators. Allowing people to build on others’ work without fear of legal consequence would greatly quicken the pace of creative progress, create valuable information filters, and ultimately provide the democratic ideal of totally free speech.

When limited physical resources were required to distribute information, it made sense to charge for dissemination. Now, the nature of digital information is that it can be infinitely, perfectly copied for little cost. Applying traditional copyright law to this new technology makes little logical sense, and so people tend to disregard the law until penalties are severe. Jessica Litman explains that people don’t obey the laws they don’t believe in, and that copyright law is arcane, complicated and created by industry interests, not consumers’ [1]. Combined, these factors lead to a population that does not obey copyright law, nor believes that it should.

Hackers are an excellent example of law breakers that justify their unlawfulness. Technology moves very quickly due in part to hackers and engineers and even children all working passionately to make practical uses of knowledge. When people can share knowledge and progress via the network, the aggregate effect of shared information is staggering. Thus it seems impossible that the very mechanism that enabled this great commonwealth would turn around and place restrictions on itself in the form of digital copyright law. Meaning, the decentralized human information bank will always allow hackers to circumvent any technical limitations on information, since they themselves created the technologies that made the limitations possible.

Creators of digital technology are affording us the ability to create more freely and actually quicken the pace of human creativity. Fair use laws begin to address the issue of people needing information created by others to advance ideas further. That is why information borrowed for scholarly and critical use is protected. Since the value of the activity of building on previous creations is realized by the most educated, wouldn’t it follow to broaden that protection to the marketplace? Just because someone can make money off of someone’s else idea doesn’t make it bad. It should be liberating to the original creators and inspire them to work harder on better ideas, whether they are money making or not.

Building on previous creations adds value to the original work. The internet allows anyone to share anything they want, which results in a lot of noise and banal information and creations. Many people complain that the biggest problem they face online is dealing with the extraneous, pointless, time-consuming information overload. But when people participate in remixing material, they are filtering information in a useful way for others to enjoy. For example, an artist known as Kutiman took dozens of amateur Youtube videos of people playing music and remixed them into new songs [2]. The effect is incredible, and it made all of those low-quality amateur videos take on a new level of meaning and value. Without people submitting their boring content, artists like Kutiman would not be able to elevate that information into something of much higher worth. The effect of aggregate contributions online allow for a much higher output of creativity.

The importance of filters online is perhaps the biggest and most exciting challenge the internet presents. No single person can consume all information available to him, so having a trusted filter to present the content meaningful to a specific person is very valuable. Kutiman demonstrates one way that artists can filter information for a viewer.

Aside from the unfortunate name, scraping is another form of filtering information that can be very valuable. For example, a website dedicated to pulling videos filmed underwater from various video hosting sites would be more valuable to someone with an underwater fetish than a single Youtube search for the same content. Scraping allows aggregators to give people more relevant information to their particular interests, while saving them time spent sifting through information.

Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks provides interesting conclusions on filtering, in relationship to the “Babel” concept. The Babel concept is the idea that proliferation of information would lead to so much noise as to drown out anything valuable. If everyone can speak, no one can be heard, unless money is used to determine who gets to speak. What Benkler offers to counteract the Babel objection is the idea of non-proprietary filters. The network enables non-propietary filters to be created easily. When people have the ability to choose between many different filtered channels of information that are not property of any one entity, they have the opportunity to select among content providers that “reflect genuinely diverse motivations and organizational forms” [3].

Computer scientist Ian Clarke created a technical solution to protect the sharing of information in a non-proprietary manner. His project, Freenet, is a piece of software that allows people to completely anonymously share information over the network. What separates it from the BitTorrent service is that information on the network is stored in an anonymous, decentralized manner. Essentially, users of Freenet must agree to store small pieces of information on their computers, but the information is encrypted so that the user has no idea what the information is. This protects individuals from having to host complete files and keeps the file distribution widely available. What Clarke’s software enables is completely free speech, since users have absolutely no risk of being identified [4]. Though this may lead to concern about what type of information is being shared, the ability to have true free speech should be considered a remarkable democratic achievement for our society.

Clarke addresses the issues that Freenet causes with copyright. One cannot enforce copyright in any manner if information sharing is anonymous and decentralized. So Clarke set out to devise new schemes for artists to be compensated for their work. He argues that a simple donation model could be effective, but requires a wider sense of self interest. Instead he suggests an investment model called Fair Share, where people invest in artists they like and get a percentage of money that future investors contribute. Acknowledging the fact that it sounds like a pyramid scheme, Clarke defends the idea with the transparency that most people will not profit form their investments, but should instead be rewarded with the knowledge that they contributed to an artist that they like [5].

New models such as Clarke’s Fair Share are integral to combat illogical copyright law. One concept of increasing relevance is that of currency. Information shared online loses relevance after just a couple hours, since so much information replaces it so quickly. The more frequently one updates, the more likely that information will remain relevant. Artists should be encouraged to be prolific creators as to remain relevant. And people might be willing to pay to keep that artist producing current work. For example, I personally would like someone to take my podcast content and do whatever they want with it, because that spreads my ideas further and I can always create more podcasts and improve my content.

Creative works are a renewable resource, and perhaps an effective compensation model to replace copyright would be to subscribe to a stream of new material. I am currently experimenting with a “premium lifestream”, where people pay to receive my more personal information, failure documentation, and filtered gems from the archive. So far the experiment is working and people are subscribing, so I will continue my investigation. If someone takes material out of the password protected area and distributes it or remixes it, I take that as good advertising. The point of subscribing is to be the first to receive new, recent (or recently filtered) lifestream material, not to have access to an archive that can be perfectly reproduced elsewhere.