You don’t have to look very far to see that copyright is in a pretty sad state nowadays. There are lawsuits flying left and right, sometimes even targeting children and deceased people. Companies attempt to scare, coerce, and bully citizens into paying thousands of dollars for a few dozen or few hundred dollars worth of content, and the courts are imposing even more ridiculous verdicts amounting to costs of several thousand dollars per song. There’s even been pressure for governments to turn into copyright police or worse.
While the most active arena for this ridiculosity would appear to be the music industry, the movie and software industries are not far behind, and with the growing popularity of e-book readers books and printed-media are bound to follow shortly. The core issue behind all of this nonsense is the same no matter the context, and it is that content owners feel compelled to continue enforcing a copyright model that came into existence well before the Internet, while simultaneously resisting any and all attempts to change, reform, or modernize the underlying model to bring it up to speed with the technology of today. The original creators of copyright law did not envision a world in which any piece of information could be replicated and distributed anywhere on the globe instantly at almost zero cost. They did not stop to consider the social implications of such a technology, nor what it would mean for content creators, owners, and distributors.
For our less technologically adept visitors I’d like to digress into a bit of an example. Consider the web browser that you are using to view this website. It has created, without any explicit consent from myself, and quite possibly without your knowledge, at least one copy of all the content that you see on this page. It holds this copy in memory and uses it as its internal representation of the website state. Also, unless you have disabled your browser’s cache, then it has very likely created a second copy of all the content on this page, this time stored on your computer’s HDD. While the first copy will disappear as soon as you leave the page, this second copy may stick around on your computer for weeks, months, or even years. And if you want to get technical, there is a third copy of this website that is stored in your computer’s video framebuffer while you are reading it/displaying it on the screen. So by simply accessing this website, you have caused up to three copies to come into existence. And I could assert, under current copyright law, that each one of those copies has been produced illegally. And if we use the benchmark figure of $2250 per illicit copy, you will see that you now owe me $6750 for your browser’s misbehavior. So you see how ridiculous it can get when every copy that gets produced is treated as if it is some tangible thing that must be tracked and paid for. Or if you don’t then please mail me my $6750 (cash only, please, no personal checks).
Current intellectual-property laws were designed for an analog world in which a copy of something always had a 1:1 mapping back to some tangible item in the physical world, and in which the distribution of an illicit copy robbed the content creator not just of the effort they put into creating their intellectual property, but also of part of the capital which they had invested in creating and distributing legitimate physical copies of their work. We no longer live in such a world, however. The cost of creating and distributing copies of a work is now essentially nil (unless you happen to be one of the few holdouts who still insist on distributing physical media), and we should be loathe to apply a model designed for an analog world to today’s digital context. Unfortunately that’s exactly what we’ve done, and it has lead directly to the aforementioned ridiculous outcome(s).
So it should be clear that something needs to be changed. But what? My suggestion is that the whole issue of copyright as it pertains (or rather, should pertain) to digital content can be understood through two competing concerns:
- The social benefits of a world in which every person has instant and unrestricted access to every piece of information, media, and digital content ever created are far too great to be ignored or repressed.
- The people who invest their time and effort into creating a piece of intellectual-property deserve compensation for their efforts in an amount that is proportional to the popularity of the content they produce.
Given the first point, it should be clear that the days in which people pay for this-or-that specific bit of content in individual transactions are rapidly coming to a close. There is simply no excuse for not allowing everyone to have access to everything, when the net social benefits of the proposition are considered.
We’ve all seen movies or read books that depict a sci-fi future world in which anyone can sit down at a public (or private) terminal and pull up any bit of content they desire, from music to movies to television shows and beyond. We are at the tipping point of making such a world a reality, but first we have to let go of the antiquated idea that each person should pay individually for exactly the content that they access or consume. Such a model made sense in a world of tangible things, of which only a finite number of copies may be created, and where each copy carries a very real cost associated with its production, distribution, and stocking. But we are rapidly leaving that world behind, and this model no longer makes sense.
Now it’s easy to just say that everyone should get all of this for free, but that would be ignoring the second point. The individuals who spend their time creating the content that the rest of us consume deserve fair compensation for their efforts. Without that, there would simply be no incentive for people to continue to create music, art, movies, and the like (the cliche of the “starving artist” notwithstanding). The content creators (and owners, though I really wish artists would wake up and realize that they no longer need to sign their lives away to large media corporations in order to be successful) should be able to profit from their work, particularly if their work becomes widely popular. So where does that leave us? We could say that each individual who wants access to a particular piece of content must purchase it directly, but that gets us nowhere, it’s just the same broken status quo that we have today. And that’s not good enough.
What I think we need, and where I think we need to get to is, in essence, an Internet tax (to use the most easily comprehensible if not the most strictly accurate of terms). Basically, there should be some reasonable monthly fee that is assessed against each ISP in terms of dollars per connected user. This fee would of course be passed on from the ISP’s to their customers, so the cost of Internet access would increase slightly. All proceeds from this monthly “tax” would go into a fund that is distributed (again monthly) to intellectual-property creators/owners, based upon the relative popularity of their content during that month. This of course requires a way of determining a rough estimate of how many times a given piece of content is accessed, but given that the RIAA and MPAA and others seem to have no trouble coming up with estimates of how much money they are “losing” to piracy I have to believe that doing so is entirely possible. Either that or these media companies are guilty of blowing smoke up our collective asses.
If this all sounds a little far-fetched to you (or if you’ve experienced the typical “no new taxes” reflex), consider that there are already a number of opt-in services that are essentially following this model. Services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, Google Music, and even Netflix all collect a monthly subscription in exchange for unlimited access to any content you want. Internally these companies are simply pooling their monthly subscription revenues, paying a portion of it out to their content providers as royalties (almost certainly based upon how many times each piece of content was accessed, as in “based upon the relative popularity” of content), using the rest to cover operating expenses, and keeping whatever is left over as profit.
There are limits to these services, of course, the biggest one being that you only get access to content owned/created by groups that have explicitly signed agreements with these companies. If you happen to want something that is created by an artist or owned by a company who doesn’t want to play along with the service provider, then you are out of luck.
Thus my proposal is to simply take a model which has already proven popular and successful, centralize it, and remove the ability of everyone on both sides to opt out. Every individual with an Internet connection has to “subscribe” and no artist or company may opt out of the system, and that is the trade-off. Everybody pays, and everybody gets equal and unrestricted access to everything. Governments can stop playing copyright police, media companies can stop lawyering everybody to death, the courts can stop levying massive fines against normal citizens who haven’t done anything that the rest of us haven’t done and continue to do every single day, artists can continue to earn a living by producing popular works of art, and everyone can enjoy the collective creative output of the human race without restriction or fear of reprisal.
So how much would this actually cost? That I cannot exactly say. But as a baseline most of the aforementioned music services start at around $5 per month. The unlimited-streaming video Netflix package is $8 per month. So that makes $13 per month combined for unlimited music and video. However when participation is compulsory the user-base increases significantly, and the economy of scale starts to come into play. So I would think that in the neighborhood of $10 to $15 per month for complete and unlimited access to all the world’s movies, music, television shows, and books would be adequate. The only question you have to ask yourself is; would I pay $100 to $200 a year for unlimited access to any and all media I happen to want, with the knowledge that my money is going to support the artists who create the content I most enjoy?
I know I certainly would, particularly if it meant that I would never again have to pay for an individual song, album, DVD, or book again, nor worry about corporate goons snooping on my online activities, slapping me with a lawsuit, or trying to subvert the government and turn copyright infringement into a capital offense. There’s a wonderfully bright sci-fi future waiting for us over the next hill, we just have to realize that it no longer makes sense to keep an antiquated copyright model around on life-support, and that reaching the top of the hill will require a small bit of sacrifice from each and every one of us.
I for one am looking forward to that day when anyone anywhere can sit down at an Internet-connected terminal and have free and unfettered access to the collective works of all mankind. And if it costs me $15 a month to make that possible, then so be it.
