Karl Fogel, Copyright Activist
In the blogging community it isn’t difficult to find people who despise the current copyright regime and think it should be changed. But you’d have to look long and hard for someone who believes that copyright should be banned outright. Karl Fogel, a leading open source proponent and copyright activist, is not one of these people. He does feel, however, that this is a useful starting point for figuring out the right way to approach this issue. Rather than assuming that some copyright is necessary and trying to decide exactly how much is optimal, he suggests that we imagine a world without copyright and take it from there.
He contends at the beginning of the podcast that, not only does he not know personally what the right level of copyright is, but that it isn’t possible to know this based on current evidence, a view that I find eminently reasonable. I also agree wholeheartedly with the way he concludes our discussion:
I think that there is some built-in exclusivity there but I also think… whatever change is going to happen is going to happen essentially through a market process. It’s not going to be that Congress suddenly wakes up and drastically reconsiders copyright law. Instead, some number of artists, just as some number of software developers did a couple of decades ago, will by choice release their stuff under these liberal copyrights, And they will create this little fertile safe space for sharing that will grow, and basically we’ll have two parallel streams: there’s the old stream and the free stream. And people will just start choosing stuff based on what they like, not based on ideological concerns about how it was produced. And we’ll just see what happens.
At the end of the day, we need to create an environment where individuals can test their own approaches to copyright and let the market decide what works best. I don’t necessarily see as strong a connection as Karl between liberal copyright terms and free content, however, and I hope that this makes our discussion more dynamic and thought-provoking.
Oh, and having listened to the final product, I seem to be doing the majority of the talking. I’ve always wanted these podcasts to resemble debates rather than interviews, but I’m not sure that I’ve found the right balance yet. So I resolve in 2007 to make an effort in any future podcasts to shut up and listen, as much as possible.
Download the podcast (high quality, 50 Mb) (low quality, 12 Mb)
Hifi streaming (128 Kb/s):
Lofi streaming (32 Kb/s)
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how come you releasing it as an mp3? given that you guys are such liberal dudes, surely the podcast format should be ogg or something more open, yeah?
Comment by hamish — 12/31/2006 @ 12:17 am
Matt, it appears you’re happy to have artists create in pursuit of great wealth, even if the chances of obtaining great wealth (regardless of copyright regime) is miniscule. But many of these wanna-be’s would be personally better off (again, under any regime) pursuing a career in investment banking, car mechanics, or whatever, and keeping their artistic pursuits on the side. The illusion that great wealth is a real possibility itself has several individual and social opportunity costs.
You (and just about everyone else) also kept saying that creative output should be maximized. Remove the modifier “creative” to see how silly this is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus should be maximized.
Karl, you appear (you mentioned fan-created sci fi a few minutes long) to not be aware of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wreck:_In_the_Pirkinning (feature length, perhaps 1980s studio quality) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephants_Dream (11 minutes, perhaps year 2000 studio quality).
Comment by Mike Linksvayer — 12/31/2006 @ 8:26 am
Hamish - the advantage of MP3 is that it works absolutely everywhere.
Comment by Matt — 1/2/2007 @ 2:15 pm
Mike - obviously it’s up to potential artists themselves to balance the opportunity cost of a career in “the arts” against the advantages of whatever other career path is available. People will sometimes make bad decisions, but I don’t think that the solution is to keep the value of an artistic career low so that people are reluctant to pursue one. Note that a miniscule chance of achieving great wealth is very different from no chance (witness how many people play the lottery) and for me one implication of a tiny chance of huge financial rewards is that more reasonable financial rewards (enough to live off, say) will be easier to achieve.
Comment by Matt — 1/2/2007 @ 2:20 pm
People will sometimes make bad decisions, but I don’t think that the solution is to keep the value of an artistic career low so that people are reluctant to pursue one.
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Comment by Kız — 5/27/2008 @ 11:00 pm