Copyblight
In today’s Scripting News, Dave Winer explains why he is parting ways with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Despite his long-standing support for the EFF, Dave now feels that they have become as dogmatic and extreme as the media industry they are battling:
The issue appears to be copyright, and it appears that the EFF believes there should be no copyright. My position is that copyright changes with the development of worldwide networking, and all creative people must have some right to the work they create, or else, truly, the incentive to create will disappear.
I worship the EFF. They’re my heros. There’s so much wrong with the way that the media industry is approaching the advent of digital content distribution. Between the shockingly bad legislation already in place, the braindead proposals on the table and the potentially debilitating legal precedent of the Grokster vs. MGM case (which kicks off today before the Supreme Court), there’s a real risk that technological progress in the digital media space will be completely paralyzed for the forseeable future. Thank goodness the EFF is around to agitate against this disturbing trend.
Nonetheless, I have a lot of sympathy for Dave’s position. Too many of these admirable copyright freedom fighters are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to believe that creative types will be motivated to produce top-notch output even if copyright is eliminated and content is free. A lot of the evidence put forward to support this view is based on temporary distortions in the digital marketplace. Cory Doctorow, whose work for the EFF I greatly admire, is a case in point. He’s made his first two novels available without charge for downloading while continuing to sell a bound printed version, apparently without suffering financially. And today, he posted to Boing Boing with a link to a study that purports to show that peer-to-peer downloads haven’t hurt the music industry’s bottom line.
As I’ve argued in the past, the viability of the free-online/pay-offline business model for textual content is premised on the fact that reading electronic text is too inconvenient to tempt large numbers of readers away from print media. This is going to change, inevitably, with the arrival of high-resolution, lightweight, flexible electronic paper. As far as the music industry is concerned, it frankly beggars belief that widespread downloading of pirated music hasn’t had a deleterious impact on CD sales. From what I’ve seen, once people get hooked on the online music experience they’re relunctant to go back to CDs. I don’t mean to defend the tragically wrong-headed strategy of the RIAA, with its draconian DRM and bullying lawsuits. But we should be pushing for a more attractive legal online music alternatives, not trying to convince ourselves that P2P networks dominated by wholesale piracy are compatible with a healthy future for digital media. (That said, it would be a calamity if the Supreme Court were to rule against Grokster. You can’t ban a general-purpose technology because some people are using it for illegal activities.)
Another case in point is Chris Anderson’s attempt to marry his brilliant long tail meme with Larry Lessig’s argument that copyright restrictions on more obscure content are unnecessary because these works have little commercial value anyway. Chris ends up concluding that the two are compatible because profits from the long tail will come from repurposing older works, not selling them directly. My take on this would be different: Lessig is dead-on in his assertion that creative output would benefit from less onerous restrictions. But the lesson of the long tail really is that there is increasingly broad scope for selling content that was commercially inviable in the past. The solution is not to insist that content must be free, it’s to tailor licensing practices, business models and pricing schemes so that creative types can make money without stifling the ability of others to slice and dice the fruits of their labor in new and exciting ways.
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