Closing today, a poll at The Economist on the motion :
"This house believes that existing copyright laws do more harm than good."
http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/144
If you want to get really angry, read the proposer's erudite arguments for stripping us of moral and economic rights in our work whilst imposing compulsory registration of all works, so we are anonymised recipients of tax-derived blanket fees fixed and dispensed by, well, who knows who. It ain't your work, it's theirs. Fill in these forms sonny and get back to work.
Notice, with only slight amusement, that The Economist rights-grabs all contributions to the discussion, thereby demonstrating the real problem is not copyright itself but unbounded corporate greed.
Notice, too, that David Lammy, currently reviewing copyright law for government, is a featured guest. No doubt as a politician Lammy will be mindful of the wishes expressed through the Economist's vote. So far 73% support the motion, 27% against.
Current copyright law is indeed inadequate and needs reform, but not in the way that the proposer suggests. At the moment it provides far too feeble protection for copyright holders, and the explosion of the internet and widespread copyright abuse that it has encouraged has brought the editorial market - quality newspapers and magazines of the calibre of the Economist, Newsweek et al., to their knees.
I doubt that many freelance or staff journalists working for the Economist would like to be obliged to work for free and have their content freely available to the public for nothing - they will quite simply stop producing, at least stop producing quality content. The media is facing a crisis - how to make money out of the information free-for-all that is the internet. It is clear that many excellent publications will go to the wall, and it is not clear what will be left.
The answer has to be a strengthening of copyright legislation, to bring a measure of common sense to the internet. Greater penalties for breach of copyright, so that someone who can not prove that their breach was innocent has to pay a multiple of the amout they would have to pay normally as damages, criminal penalties for the worse cases.
At the moment, a publisher on the internet can happily break the law in the knowledge that, if ever found out, the amount of damages will barely be more than the amount he would have had to have paid if he had acted honestly. And usually even if caught he is unlikely to have to pay and can simply sit back and ignore the law, hiding behind the anonymity of an IP address in a different jurisdiction. No wonder that the internet has created such a mess for content providers.
Registration cannot be the answer - it can protect only large corporations that can afford it, and will destroy the freelance provider - so far as he or she has managed to survive the destruction of freelance markets in recent years.
The problem is not how to secure a greater flow of free information to the internet for the future, it is how to control and allow content providers to charge for the existing free-for-all.
Post new comment