personal freedom vs copyright (Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)

[Adam Back]

There's been some recent discussion of ethics and markets relating to
copyright prompted by the Orwellian sounding overtones of the latest
Microsoft powergrab.

Seems about time to replay my periodic reminder that copyright is not
a black-and-white moral issue, it is merely a societal convention
which given public appetites for file sharing, and extreme difficulty
of preventing the public continuing apace (kazaa has some millions of
users online, with 2 peta-bytes of shared files and growing), it seems
to me that the natural evolution of laws etc would be for the laws
surrounding copyright be revoked as out-dated and no longer
applicable in an era of digital copying.  Without this adjustment
reality and content distribution laws are getting increasingly
out-of-synch, which is going to lead to some probable very undesirable
side effects in more laws further tilting the playing field in the
favor of the big media cartels, and starting to lead to very draconian
and Orwellian systems enforced under force of law.

Copyright is effectively a massive corporate welfare program to the
benefit of the media cartels at this point.  It's a business model
protection racket with the government providing the thugs at no
expense to the business.  No wonder the businesses that benfit from
this want to lobby to maintain this free enforcement corporate welfare
handout.  They get the financial benefits, and don't care about the
negative societal implications, such as described in Stallmann's
prescient essay on the long term implications of the coming brawl.

I don't see that the media cartels -- the main short-term benefactors
and lobbyists of the current and rapidly expanding copyright laws have
any moral right to have these conventions and corporate welfare
continue.  If society just said no, which it would appear of the
internet population they largely are, I think it likely we'd still
have movies, music etc., and that artists would continue to make money
and businesses associated with managing artists works would also make
money; the landscape might look a little different but so what.  Also,
even if one type of business model or content was no longer
economically supported, I can't see how that's a loss, or a bad thing
-- if there is no economic, coercion free model where a business can
provide service to end-users who want that service, then by definition
that service should not exist.

Many of the existing methods of capitalising on content remain without
copyright:

- convenience (if copies on physical media are competitively priced vs
  peoples time to source and download), 
- advertising (compete for placing in order of user preferred downloads)
- live events
- higher spec projection equipment (movie theatre vs home viewing)
- branding - reliability, certified quality (guarantees of download
  speed, bit-rate, resolution audio quality)

So I say scrap copyright now, and let the market sort out which
business models and distribution comapnies surive which new business
models emerge, and then we can avoid the Orwellian power-grab which
will have many freedom destroying and negative societal costs.

Adam
--
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/