The Tyranny of Free: Copyright, the Internet and Their Clash

Who said there is no free lunch? And do they have a copyright on it?

Copyright is one of the most important types of wealth made possible mainly by government regulations. U.S. copyright is a regulatory system run by the Library of Congress (ironically a place where one can read books including mine for free). Copyright has been an important tool from keeping publishers who did not have contracts with writers and artists from publishing the works of others. And for awhile it worked to some degree to help those artists and writers in their fiduciary battles with publishers. But today everyone can be a publisher and copying content and distributing it is practically free and copyright is difficult to police. And most brilliant of all, any fence put up to control access to content on the Internet limits the ability of the potential viewer to find it and obversely makes it more likely that the viewer will find the same or related content elsewhere. I would also argue that copyright in its present form is destructive to creativity, as a high percentage of works are synthesized.

And so now the world is saturated with the old and new content to the point where a person can listen to or read a lifetime's worth of content all through their connection to the Internet without paying anything to anyone except for the connection and equipment and sometimes not even that. How will new artists, writers and their publishers ever make enough to support themselves? The answer so far has been to depend on a mix of control, ease of use, non-Internet revenue streams and advertising. And, oh yes, voluntary donations. But the use of government copyright regulations and civil and criminal enforcement is quickly becoming impossible as a means for collecting revenue (sorry RIAA).

Every day we hear of newspapers bleeding red ink, book and album sales decreasing and whispers of the movie and television industry losing control of their markets through the flood of free competitors and chinks in the DCMA armor. Is there a solution?

Potential Solution

Once one realizes that most copied content is valued based on copyright, a straightforward and accepted government regulation. And to be clear, I am using the word "value" in a strictly economic sense. However, I would posit that the more important measure of content is harder to explain. Does entertainment, education other attributes of content have objective and measurable value? And if more content is available to all citizens than they could consume in their lifetimes, why waste effort in creating more (putting aside ephemeral art that cannot be captured and therefore not copied successfully)? The answer is as obvious as it is ineffable.

One solution has been advertising and can continue to the answer. However, advertising will not support much eventually if content itself loses economic value as well as loss of control of venue. And, in my opinion, advertising has a corrupting influence, especially as other revenue streams become scarcer; that limits a creator's, editor's and audience's ability to affect the content. Another solution is for voluntary payments which is sort of working, but will be insufficient to sustain much (despite Kachingle's and Amazon's best efforts). And there is patron and government philanthropy which mixed with voluntary donations has made NPR an important, although not a sustainable model for most media in our "market" economy.

But there is one system that has so far played only a small roll in the United States, direct government enforced license fees on media. Indirectly though, this has played a major role in content in television. Cable franchises have been created that enforce a tiered licensing system, where customers pay a flat fee that pays for a wide spectrum of content (admittedly of varying quality). Due to collusion between municipalities and cable companies, cable fees are essentially opaque license fees for access that have been used to sustain a great deal of content. This is unlike the British model that is is transparent and obvious.

One problem in selling this solution in the United States is the odd belief in the market system where we should all individually choose to buy content and let the purchases be the sole determinant of who is allowed to create content. The reality has been that massive government participation has propped up the current system through the copyright system, civil courts (and thanks to DCMA criminal as well), municipal monopoly franchises, tax breaks and subsidies for content creation, and overseeing the ownership and distribution of content using the airwaves and wires. And, oh yes, the government's direct payment in the form of advertising for public notice which has been an important means of support for local newspapers. 

So I propose a tiered license fee for access to the Internet. The revenue could support a huge swath of content that, although is hard to value in dollar terms, would be invaluable to the quality of life and to the culture. Which is not to say that individual bloggers and artists should get a cut for clicks (a method of measuring interest), but that the funds could support peer reviewed and hybrid controlled organizations that find a multitude of ways to support content creation. Advertising, donor support, and amateur content can continue to thrive in this environment. However, continued government regulation through copyright should be curtailed as counterproductive to culture post-Internet and being generally ineffective. And for those who think that government's influence can only be destructive, please stop using web browsers, the World Wide Web and the Internet, all three technologies created initially by the government and each won a fair fight in the marketplace (note, on the Internet, all things being close to equal, the free one will likely win--sorry patent holders).

One example is the need to move away from copyright regulations for medical content. When my wife needed immediate and major medical help, I needed to learn as much as possible about a disease for which there is not yet a standard of care (i.e. clear guidelines for medical treatment). So I spent a great deal of time looking for the most up to date medical news on treatments. The best system was PubMed which is a government created search tool for most of the medical journals. But the system can only show the abstracts/summaries for journal articles that charge money for subscriptions or single articles. Without help from relatives in the medical field who have free access through their institutions, I might have had to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for this information, a potential impediment to quality care. In this case the fences built to protect copyright ironically are still successful in part, because most readers have free access subsidized often by government and government supported academic and medical institutions.

The Internet has been a major force for content distribution, multiplying the reach that the printing press brought and similarly fractionating the cost of publication. We need to be aware not only of the advantages, but also the dangers. We can not live by bread alone, but we do still need bread.*

*Deuteronomy 8: 2-3. Does God hold a copyright? Just checking.

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