Another title for this post might be Life After Writers, but even without copyright laws, some writers would still write for free, and there is a great deal more to copyright than just writers. And thus the reason for the title of this post.
As I have said before, I am patterning this make-believe look at different areas of publishing in a similar form as the wonderful History Channel series Life After People. So, with that in mind, I give no explanation at all why suddenly copyright doesn’t exist. I’m going to assume it just flat one moment stopped and try to look beyond that moment. Unlike my previous two subjects of Returns and Agents, where the publishing industry got better in both cases when they vanished, this will have a much similar effect on publishing as the sudden vanishing of people has on our architecture in the history channel series. Not good. Very bleak, so be warned.
So, staying in the same formula, here we go.
Life After Copyright: 1 Minute
One minute after the sudden vanishing of all copyright laws around the world, not a lot would be happening except for many experienced writers suddenly realizing they are out of a job. And many publishers would be shouting orders to try to get copies of certain things. The realization that they are soon to be out of business would not have sunk in yet.
Now is a good time to explain copyright and give a little very basic history for those who don’t understand that writers don’t “sell” a story or novel or article.
In the United States, copyright is a constitutional right, actually written into the document. If you don’t believe me, go read it.
However, since that first drafting, the laws (and around the world) have been changed to give the owners of intellectual property more rights until today, anything you write down and commit to a form is automatically protected under our laws for your life plus 70 years. This is pretty standard around the world due to a number of international copyright conventions that almost all countries signed to protect artists and writers worldwide.
Ideas are not protected under copyright law, just the form of the writing. And this protection allows us writers to make a living. We don’t have to put our copyright symbol on the work (although for a time in history we did) and we don’t have to register it (except to file a court case in this country) for the protection. The protection is automatic and ownership is assumed to the author. We no longer even have to renew every 28 years, although for a long time we did.
Now, understand, I am not a lawyer (three years of law school did not make me one). Be clear on that and make sure you study copyright on your own if you are trying to sell any kind of writing or intellectual property to anyone.
So, as should be clear to everyone, this blog is mine, I own it, I can sell it, post it here for free, anything I want. I own it completely. And posting it here for free does not mean I have given anyone permission to use it or sell it. Nope, haven’t done so.
So, how do authors make a living with their writing? Easiest way to explain it would be to think of all the rights associated with the ownership of this blog, or a short story, or a novel, as a pie-shaped circle. I can cut out a small slice and call it “first serial” and license it to a magazine. Or cut another slice and package it as a book in North America and license first North American publishing rights. Or give it to an electronic publisher and license electronic rights of some sort or another. Or cut yet another slice and license the rights to a game publisher for a game of some sort.
And the pieces can come back to me and I can relicense them if I am good with contracts. There is no limit to how many thousands of pieces can be cut and licensed and then relicensed over my lifetime plus 70 years after my death.
Everything you write under copyright law has this pie-shaped circle of rights that are only limited by the writer’s ability to think of them and license them.
Notice I did not say “sell” them. We don’t sell copyright, we license it. But the two terms have become so interchangeable in publishing, I’m not going to fight it. When I say sell, just think license.
So, if suddenly anything ever written and anything new that is written had no one controlling all the rights and no requirement for license to use, we would have exactly what I am suggesting in Life After Copyrights.
Writers could no longer make a living.
I can hear many people say “Why not?”
Let me give an example of why not. I write a novel, send it to a New York publisher to buy. They wouldn’t have to buy it, they could just take it and publish it freely without copyright protection and I would be owed nothing and have no right to get any money for it. So I wouldn’t do that, and I would even be afraid to show it to a printer, since they could just go ahead and take it and print it and sell the books and I would have no recourse.
In the brave new world of no copyright, I could write Trek with Donald Duck as the main character fighting Sherlock Holmes and no one could stop me as long as I put the little trademark symbols beside the names. Of course, no one would pay me anything for doing so, even if it was published everywhere. No copyright, no protection at all.
No protection, no money.
No ownership either. Copyright is like a property law (with some differences).
So another example would be that you build a house, and your neighbor likes your new house better and just moves in and takes it because you don’t own it and never can own it because there are no property laws. Without property laws and protection and ownership rights, you would have no recourse against him.
So, if all copyright laws suddenly vanished around the world, there would simply be no way for anyone to make any money off of anything written. There would be nothing to “sell.”
Life After Copyright: 1 Hour
I don’t know about other full-time writers, but at one hour I would be still sitting in shock, not having a clue what to do next. Since I react fairly quickly, I might be looking for a job as a bartender, or something I might be qualified to do. But more than likely I would be just sitting, doing nothing as most full-time writers would do at one hour.
99% of all beginning writers wouldn’t have a clue anything was wrong because they have yet to learn copyright.
Publishers would be in a panic. Sure, books could still be produced and the physical nature of the book sold, but the smart publishers would start understanding that they would be seeing very little new work from that moment forward and lists can only be filled so long with reprints. And with the internet, any book of value and interest to wide masses would be filling the sites and anyone who really wanted the book could get the book for free.
Hollywood and the gaming industry would also be in a panic. Without ownership protection and secondary markets for movies, any movie made would hit the internet long before it could be controlled into a theater. And without the profit motive for creating new games and software, Hollywood would start shutting down as well, maybe not in one hour, but quickly.
Millions and millions of people’s jobs and businesses would suddenly be at risk and eventually lost.
Over the last few years, because of the growth of the internet, there has been lots of talk about how information needs to be free. Uh, no, not unless you want what I am about to try to describe.
Life After Copyright: 1 Day
The news casts would be shouting this news about the sudden disappearance of copyright protection and the talking heads would be yacking on every channel, but few of them would realize they were close to being out of jobs. News casts are copyright protected and without the protection, there would be no money to be made from any kind of news casts. Network television would be coasting for a short time on the contracted ads, at least a few days if not slightly longer, but not much longer. No income, no news casts.
If you don’t own something, you can’t sell advertising to pay for it or produce it, and most ads would no longer be protected either.
The stock markets around the world would be in free fall. Copyright protection is such a basic underlying principle in a free market society that without it, a vast number of major corporations would be looking at either complete loss of business or massive losses. I can’t imagine a company anywhere not being hurt in some fashion by this lack of copyright.
I’m going to assume that trademark and patent law remains, which would protect a few things, but anything in advertising that wasn’t trademarked could be stolen by anyone and used. And without copyright protection hand-in-hand with trademark, the trademark protection will have little value in most instances.
Why not? Well, think of our current systems of protections as a tripod. One leg is copyright, one is trademark, one is patent. All legs cover different areas, yet depend and support on each other in many ways. If one leg of the tripod would suddenly vanish, it won’t remain standing for long.
The music industry would be in a tailspin downward at the same time. Groups, in one fashion or another, make money by selling their work. Nothing could be sold because everything would be free to take without copyright protection. All record companies would collapse. Musicians would have to return to only live performances. Sure, some song writing would be going on, but once a song has been performed in any fashion once for any kind of public, it would be out on the internet and free for any other musician to take and use without charge.
The biggest asset the Michael Jackson estate has is a share of the Sony Catalog, which includes the Beatles. That would go from being worth millions to zero instantly.
Places like I-Tunes would go out of business fairly quickly since if you can get something fee, why buy it? Even apps for I-Phones and the like would stop being made for the most part since nothing could be sold or protected.
Copyright protection and the ability to make money off of something new is what drives most invention and creativity. Sure, there are the poets who give a copy of their poem away for free on the street corner, but those types don’t run major innovation in business and advertising and fiction and nonfiction work.
At one day, just the first rippling of the disaster headed our way would be starting through society. There was a reason the Founding Fathers put copyright protection for artists and authors into the Constitution.
Life After Copyright: 1 Week
There would be a mass scramble on to find a way to somehow protect work from hitting the internet, but as the music and movie and book industry has already discovered, that would prove fruitless quickly.
Most major companies that deal in creative license would be scrambling to find another way to stay in existence. The list of these business in trouble would number in the hundreds of thousands. Microsoft and Mac, theater chains and movie production companies, all movie rental companies, all book companies and new bookstores, all printing companies, all gaming companies, all music companies, all software companies. At one week, all of those companies and many more would be struggling to find a new way to even make a dime.
Many would just shut down and try to preserve their cash reserves for the shareholders and owners. As the understanding of the true impact of this event sunk into the world-wide business community, the stock markets around the world would be down large percentages and any smart investor would already be moving all money out of any company that depends on copyright protection in any fashion.
And many companies would be trying to move some of their protected work to trademark, but the trademark laws are pretty clear as to what can be trademarked and what can’t be, and it will make almost no difference in the long run. Once the public becomes used to taking anything they want at will, a trademark would mean little in any reality.
The world would be sliding into a major recession or possibly depression.
Life After Copyright: 1 Month
The full impact of the problem still has not been felt, but the general public is starting to understand finally as newspapers shut down, television and cable networks shut down, book publishers shut down, theaters shut down, internet stores start to shut down or are in trouble, including Netflix, I-Tunes, Amazon.com, and so many others.
The unemployment rate is starting up and at one month, it is only barely starting.
The problem is that the public is still hungry for new books, creative programs, new games, new movies. But without the ownership and profit motive, fewer and fewer creative types will be working at all. The millions it takes to make a movie will not be available so no new movies other than small movies done for fun by a few people will be in the works. All major movie stars will be out of jobs or working cable shows where money is made by subscription.
No new game programs will be in the works other than from those hacking into old game programs and creating new just for fun. The companies that sell games, that create the new games and get them distributed to the mass audience will be shutting down at one month.
Most software programs have a patent protection, but that is also mixed in with some copyright protection. Finding the protection or even the corporate structure to continue to fund new software programs without copyright protections will be tough, if not impossible. Thousands and thousands of programmers will be on the verge of being out of work or already laid off, and will have time to create free software on their own. But there will be no profit motive in any work they do.
There will be a huge push to find ways of protecting work on the internet, including encryption programs and other methods of stopping a work from being passed around. Most won’t work for very long as has already been discovered by many, many people.
Remember, without copyright, nothing creative can be sold. There is no ownership to sell (license). And without the protection, there would be no reason for anyone to pay money for anything offered to them. Once they see it, they can just use it.
Back to publishing. Most major book publishers at one month would be coasting or shutting down. Most have lists of books lined up for at least a year or more, but why spend more money on those books unless a way can be figured out to protect them in the process. The focus would also be on trying to figure out a way to get authors to still write for them and a way to pay the authors for work that could be taken and used without notice at any step in the system. No professional author is going to spend months writing a book, then offer it to someone who can at that point simply take it and publish it and keep any money made. I doubt this problem would ever be solved on a large scale.
There will still be a demand for book as an item, in hardback or paperback form, but with the advent of Kindles and the like, once a book hits the internet for free, it will be cutting drastically into any market, and anyone who would want could simple have it printed. Print on demand houses would remain in business and grow, more than likely.
Without certain protections, even the companies who have patent and trademark protection on reading devices will lose the battle eventually, including the cash stream of selling products for their devices.
Many writers out there would keep writing. Somehow printing up and selling their own new work, often using a subscription-based method over the internet. I personally would be watching the collapse from a bartender’s job.
Life After Copyright: 1 Year
The world would be in a vast and deep recession or sliding into a depression. Millions and millions and millions of jobs world wide would have been lost suddenly with the vanishing of copyright protection and the weakening of trademark and patent protection in the process.
With few small exceptions of reprint imprints, all publishers would be out of business as well as most newsstand magazines. Some internet magazines done for love, owner written, and somehow slightly protected and paid with subscriptions or donations would survive. Newspapers would be gone and all news would have moved completely to the internet and more than likely be some sort of subscriber payment or donation payment for breaking news. These would be small.
The cable news programs might find a way to survive because of subscription costs of cable programming.
Cable companies would still be functioning at a small scale and would start to be the capital behind funding new shows, much as cable networks do today. All paid by subscription and small ads. But this would also be small because once aired, any show can be taken and copied and distributed easily by anyone. Small local source vendors would spring up selling copied shows and locally printed books. At one year none of this would be settled out yet.
All of this loss of protection would focus the attention on the governments to control the sources of all this free material. Without a functioning free press in a free economy, paid for by advertising and cable fees and protected by the copyright laws, governments around the world would have to step in and fund certain areas of the media just to keep something going. And history has always proven that when the government controls the news and flow of creative work, democracy and capitalism tends to be in trouble.
Life After Copyright: 10 Years
The world would not be the same place as I type this today.
Before copyright laws existed, there were a number of ways of funding new work. Mostly patrons, the church, or the government paid for artists to work for them, doing a certain job (like painting a church ceiling) and more than likely that system would be back in full bloom.
Freelance writers would be creating for small audiences, small private groups, artists would be painting for fees for the right to own an original work, musicians would be playing to small audiences original work also paid for by a patron. And so on. The free work available across the internet would be used as promotion to get a writer or an artist hired to do private work. But 99% of all artist, all writers, all musicians would be out of work or doing what they love as a hobby and nothing more.
Government paid and run television and news casts would be the norm around the world, filtering the news as needed for the current government. The internet would be expanding even more than it is today, trying to fight back against the news control (note: Iran), but computer technology and advancement would be mostly at a crawl, especially on the hardware side.
Invention of all sorts, even patented work, would be slowed to almost a crawl. The days when innovation and creation seemed to stay ahead of us all would be long gone. The world would still be in a deep depression and capitalism and in some cases democracy around the world would be in trouble in many ways.
The demand for entertainment would be strong, but funding such entertainment on any large scale would be difficult at best and the distribution systems would all be gone. Such entertainment would be left mostly in the hands of patrons or governments. Lots of writers and musicians and artists would be giving their work away for free, but without editors or ways of cutting through all the crap, the internet would look like a vast slush pile and trust me, as a former editor, that’s not something anyone would want or waste their time with.
My guess is that in ten years used bookstores would be flourishing while most new bookstores and all major chain stores would have long since been put out of business.
I am sure that in this exercise of looking ahead I have missed a number of major areas where the sudden disappearance of copyright laws would have a huge impact. And a number of you might disagree with my extrapolations. Fine, write a story or novel with this idea and your extrapolations and sell it. You have the right under the current laws to do that.
I have talked with a number of people over the past week about this and all of us have one opinion in common. We all came to the conclusion that the future without copyright law would be bleak at best, dark ages at worst. That capitalism would be in danger, and democracy, which depends on many aspects of free press, free information, and freedom of ownership with the right to sell, would also be in danger. That was our conclusions and I agree completely.
There was a reason copyright protection was in early British law, and that the Founding Fathers of this country put it in the Constitution. And there is a real reason why the expansion of copyright protections around the world has helped capitalism expand and democracy to gain roots everywhere.
It is a fundamental right to own and control what we create. Let’s just hope it doesn’t vanish at any point in the near future.
I find little to disagree with here, except that I think a private equivalent to copyright, something like non-disclosure agreements, would arise.
Want to buy a book, watch a movie, listen to a song? Sure, right after you sign this agreement that you won’t make or allow anyone else to make copies of it. Enforcement gets harder, because infringement becomes a contract dispute rather than a violation of the law. Infringers would be hard to track, too, although we might see each authorized copy somehow tagged so as to be traceable to the original recipient. (This is already being done with e.g. screening copies of movies for review or Oscar voting.)
Some businesses might not be so severely impacted: even today there are software businesses (like RedHat) who sell service rather than software. You can copy RedHat software all you like (paying attention to trademarks) but you won’t get service from them unless you pay for it. CentOS makes a minor living selling re-branded RedHat Linux distributions. But that’s hardly a business model that media companies (including book publishers) can follow.
Good points about increased government influence in news media, that’s one I hadn’t thought of.
Shared this on my writer board. Simply to have something clear and articulate counter idea to the free information cultists.
Great stuff.
Well said, Dean. Thank you!
I think this is a bit too bleak. I can download movies now but I still have a subscription to Zip.ca (a Canadian version of Netflix) and I go out to the movie theatres. People will still write fun or useful iPhone apps because people like having fun or useful iPhone apps. I prefer watching TV shows on TV at their actual air time. I still pay to buy my own copy of a book I like after I’ve read the Library’s copy. There’s something to be said for having the real deal, an official copy of something, rather than a knockoff or something I printed or burned to DVD myself. Maybe this king of thinking would quickly become old-fashioned, but I don’t think the consequences would be nearly as quick or severe as this.
I’m thinking worse still, not only could people take and get what they wanted freely – they could also alter it at will to make it “better”. Then there’s two versions of the “same” story floating around.
Without a way to clearly distinguish between the original material and altered material being peddled as original, it would be a mess of gibberish where people could be reading different versions while thinking it’s all the same.
Whatever remaining brand value an author might have had would be further diluted – although perhaps this in itself would give rise to a new business model where you could only be sure to get the original material direct from the author or his trusted sources.
Then again, people would just as well claim the work as their own, making it impossible to tell who the author actually is or which is the original version.
That’s gloomy.
Thanks, Rob, Nathan, and Alastair. And good point, Alastair. Contracts would try to jump in and fill the gap, and I have signed many of those non-disclose agreements. But as you said it would be tough to enforce and track. The reason the world’s copyright laws work as well as they do is the assumption of ownership of work. If that assumption was broken, it would be tough to enforce even with contracts. And I agree about the software comments, which is why I assumed the internet would continue onward and Redhat-like companies would become more of the norm, with service fees and subscription fees paying the way.
This was a fun exercise, although my intent in starting this series was to show how something changing would improve publishing, such as the agent mess and the returns mess, but copyright vanishing is just flat scary and nothing good would come out of it. Nothing.
Thanks for the comments.
Cheers
Dean
This is a fun thought exercise, but I think it fails to address the arguments of the kinds of people who say that information wants to be free. Perhaps some few would advocate a sudden and complete eradication of copyright, but for the most part that is a strawman argument; most copyleft advocates want to reform copyright laws, if anything, not complete abolition of copyright.
Add to the top of that the sudden and absolute character of the transition in your exercise, and you get to throw in economic collapse due to industries all vanishing overnight. I could make the same argument about petroleum; sure if it vanished instantly our civilization would be in for some rocky times. But if it is phased out over the next, oh, century, to be replaced with new technologies or the development of existing ones into a robust infrastructure, then not so much with the world ending and all that.
Dean, that’s a remarkably shallow argument. Today, copyright in practice serves mostly to protect the generous fees paid to the suits and lawyers at publishing houses. Those fees come out of the pockets of readers, users, and listeners; and from the mouths of starving writers, programmers, and artists. Without copyright, the big publishing houses and record labels would indeed cease to exist. Good riddance!
Have you ever heard of garage bands, blogs, webcomics, open-source software, fan fiction and fansubs, game patches and mods, sampled and remixed music and video, flash games, or wikipedia? Creative people the world over are willing to devote time and effort to creating beautiful things because they enjoy doing it, not to sell their baby to a publisher! (Plus, being creative is a great way to meet hot chicks. Er, unless it’s software or wikipedia…)
It is still possible for these creative people to make a living even without a publisher paying them a pathetic 5% royalty. Some folks have a day job; or live on Ramen in their parents’ basement; or have a patron; or are a kept spouse; or collect donations; or sell advertising or product placement; or work for a university; or … Yes, 99% of what we create is crap. 99% of everything is crap. The remaining 1% can seriously enrich your life, and Google helps you find that 1%!
And yes, I’m a creative person, and everything I’ve ever created I’ve given away free with a public domain license (software, photos, writing). In doing so I have neither starved my family, nor become a bartender.
GP, I wish I believed you would be right and I hope like hell we never have to find out. Problem with movies is the production costs. Anywhere along the way someone could take any part of it, or all of it after it is over and put it out for a pirate fee and the production company would have no recourse, and of course even a show on television broadcast at a certain time is done way out ahead, thus theft would be normal. Actually, it wouldn’t be theft without copyright. Everyone would have the same right to everything done, thus no capital investments because no way to sell anything besides limited channels of subscription and fee-based.
But would you pay for a subscription to something that ten minutes after it aired you could watch for free? See the problem with even that sort of system?
This was a fun exercise in creating a nasty science fiction world. Maybe I should stop writing so many thrillers and go back to writing science fiction. Nah, make more money writing thrillers.
Cheers
Dean
This is tangential, but why does copyright persist 70 years after the creator’s death? All the terrible effects you describe here have to do with the ability of the creator to make money off his work — but after he’s dead, he can’t do that anyway.
Don’t most musicians already make most of their money off of live performances already? And not just the bands playing club gigs, I mean the big guys too. You point to the value of Michael Jackson’s catalog as his biggest asset but even its $100 million estimated value was dwarfed by the money he was scheduled to make on his tour this year. The payout to him would have been $1 million per concert, according to the press, so in a couple of months of live performance he could have raked in half as much as his 40 years of accumulated copyright are estimated to be worth. The scarcity is not in copies of the songs but in the actual original live performance, in the flesh. People pay more to see Paul McCartney live in concert just once than the cost of a complete set of all the Beatles CDs and far more than they pay to see a cover band like “1964 as The Beatles” trying to duplicate the experience. True, this “live” value does not generally survive the artist, but that’s an issue for the heirs, not the artist.
Macaulay on copyright (as posted by Eric Flint): http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm
Dean,
This was an interesting article, though I’d have to say that the conclusion seems a bit of an overreaction. Without copyright, information and ideas would likely spread more easily. Perhaps capitalism would be in trouble–and I can’t say I wouldn’t mind–but it seems like democracy might flourish even more, as those who can’t afford to purchase information would be able to access it.
I have to agree with some of the “anti-copyright” points already brought up. While the law does protect the artist’s right to make money, rarely does the artist make very much–only a small percentage compared to the publishers, recording companies, etc. Certainly, you must realize this. Unless you’re lucky enough to have amazing contracts, you have to have felt the effects. Especially in the music business, artists make more money from merchandising than they do from sales of their art. The percentage of profits that publishers take is unreasonable and unfair, and international copyright treaties such as ACTA (the details of which are STILL secret–so much for democracy there), which treat fans as hardcore criminals only serve to alienate the sources of revenue.
I don’t agree with abolishing copyright law altogether, but it does need to be overhauled, protecting the artists themselves and not the corporations who exploit them. For now, I see Creative Commons licensing as the best option for artists. I just hope things get better for artists and fans before they get worse.
Good stuff, basic reading in many law classes. And as he said:
“It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.”
Cheers
Dean
Dean,
Actually I was lead to make the response I did largely because of this:
“Over the last few years, because of the growth of the internet, there has been lots of talk about how information needs to be free. Uh, no, not unless you want what I am about to try to describe.”
My point is that the changes these people want to make, the world they want to build, bear no resemblance to the scenario you then described. 99% of the people who say that information wants to be free do not advocate a complete abolition of copyright.
And the fact that you then say “As a person who makes my living off of copyright and entertainment, I have pretty much dismissed that thinking” tells me that you do not actually know what you are dismissing. Cory Doctorow, for instance, would see no conflict between making a living off his written works, and the idea that our copyright system is deeply flawed and in need of reform, or the idea that information wants to be free, which is not actually a call to eliminate copyright, but rather an observation about the cold hard facts of our current technological reality: information can be copied easily and it is difficult to enforce restrictions on this, and as time goes on this trend will increase, no matter how much some people might wish that were not the case.
In general the people who acknowledge this and say things like ‘information wants to be free,’ are advocating reform of how copyright is handled for digital media specifically, and their complaints are about specific details of law such as the DMCA, and the way it over-restricts the rights of consumers. I think laws can certainly be reformed without civilization crashing. After all, The Mouse has reformed copyright law several times, and we’re all still here. And technology can be survived as well; the VCR didn’t kill off the film and television industries as predicted, and the internet won’t kill off literature and music.
However, taken separately from any legal/political argument about the details of how our copyright system should work, your scenario about the sudden complete disappearance of copyright is fun reading! Like The Day After Tomorrow is entertaining, but doesn’t have much to do with global climate change.
Dean,
Thanks! Very well-written post and most thought-provoking. I put a pointer to it on a site that I moderate, because there are several very vocal “copyrights are rubbish” people who post there who are of the opinion that how DARE a person want to sell their work, and control what happens to it.
Deborah
There are so many things wrong with this argument that I don’t even know where to begin. I’m flabbergasted, so I’ll just say this: It may be true that at one point in the past copyright served the interests of those we now call “content creators,” but I think that time is long gone. Copyright has instead become a tool for multinational corporations to exploit and profit from those same people that copyright was once supposed to protect.
You mentioned Michael Jackson and the Beatles, so I’ll use that one example to illustrate my point. Paul McCartney, when he performs live and sings a Beatles song that he himself wrote, must now pay someone else (because other people own the rights to the Beatles’ songs). In other words, Paul McCartney no longer has the right to his own songs! How is copyright serving his interests? How is it protecting him?
Also, Travis, I’m a little confused as to which corporation you see exploiting me. I work in a partnership with my publishers and editors and make very nice money doing so, more than they do, actually. I take the risk writing something and spending my time writing it and they take the risk publishing it and promoting it. Very solid partnership. No one is exploiting me, especially not some corporation. I sort of see it as the other way around, actually. (Shhhh, don’t tell my publishers.) And copyright laws today helps me do just that and protects me just fine.
Which is why the idea of copyright suddenly vanishing is a horror story to me. Next topic will be more upbeat I hope.
Cheers
Dean
Very thought provoking. I will post the link to this blog on several writer’s groups I am with. This is become a big thing, especially with e-published authors, and with those places that give away your book as a download (many not in eBooks, but print at first) and the endless battle to fight this.
Thank you too; I did enjoy the mental exercise!
Eep, I was just making it up. No chance of this happening, I said that clearly. I just wanted to show the extreme of if it happened suddenly. I have no intention or getting into any debate about the current copyright law with anyone but an intellectual property attorney in private, and then over drinks and just for fun.
I put these articles up here for free for people to read, so clearly I have a balance I walk with my work. Each writer, under this current law, walks their own balance with all this new technology. I have nothing against anyone who wants to give their work away completely. No issue at all and this silly exercise was not intended to challenge them. Just to give people something to think about and argue with, and thus, I have done my job completely it seems.
Thanks again for your comments.
Cheers
Dean
Well, Travis, we can agree to disagree, but as I have said, I guess I must be one of those evil people taking advantage of copyright laws because I make my living at licensing copyright to my work and have for over 20 years now. I’m just very glad that my thought experiment won’t happen. Very glad.
Thanks for your comments.
Cheers
Dean
Tasty brain food, Dean, thx! I make my living (and I use the word loosely) as a freelance illustrator and designer and I agree that the loss of copyright would be a terrible thing. I DO believe copyright has become excessively restrictive, largely owing to corporate involvement in IP lawmaking, and is in need of some reform to keep pace with technology. Whatever changes are made, I imagine someone’s toes are going to be stepped on. But I take exception to the copyleft, who advocate giving work away for free. They often bolster their arguments by saying that they do this themselves, and are still thriving. What they often DON’T say is that they are usually gainfully employed in some other, far more profitable activity, and only produce creative works as a hobby. Hooray for them, but they are not likely to produce works of the caliber of more professional creative people who work at their craft full-time. It takes a lot of man-hours of study to produce a Norman Rockwell…more than could reasonably be amassed by someone who is also obligated to earn a living in another discipline. And without the shoulders of the professional giants to stand upon, the hobbyists would have precious little to offer. Almost every creative skill relies upon techniques that have been handed down from those who spent their lives mastering them.
A world without copyright would resemble Youtube squared, but without Google to keep pouring money into it. There might be an occasional oasis of quality among the desert of mediocrity, but you’d be lucky to find it before you died of thirst.
It wouldn’t kill art…there would still be value in original or live works…but it would catapult it back to a pre-industrial economic model, essentially destroying any utility digital technology may have offered.
Travis King brings up an interesting point, and that is the perception that publishing companies make a lot of money. By sheer numbers, but not accounting for size, the vast majority of publishing companies never make anyone rich. There are a few notable exceptions to this, but as a former editor, I’d like to point out that there is truth in the old adage: How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune.
I wonder if a lot of the anti-copyright forces are a reaction to the ever-lengthening reach of copyright law and of enforcement and lobby organizations. When RIAA goes after single mothers (yes, plural) and in some cases rules that they now owe more than they will make in an entire lifetime, how many anti-copyright proponents does that kind of action generate?
I think there needs to be a cultural dialogue between opposing sides and with all stakeholders involved so that we can come to some rational position that most people are comfortable with. We need to ask ourselves the fundamental questions. Should an artist’s work remain in copyright long enough to support their children but not their great-grandchildren? Is the related patent law stifling innovation in the software development sector? Are we entering an age in which mega-conglomerates hold massive portfolios of intellectual property without properly supporting art and/or innovation? Do they have a responsibility to? Can we change our culture to stop thinking that downloading songs or books or movies is a victimless crime? Can we convince people that art is valuable and should have a place in our society? I don’t think we’ve answered any of these, yet.
JM and others,
The opposite of monopoly isn’t the obliteration of intellectual property rights.
No corporate entity can control or sell your IP without you signing a contract first.
Seems to me the problem goes back to artists and creative people not being their own best business managers.
Obviously nobody wants to screw themselves over at contract time, but if people are really desperate for the money — or really desperate for exposure/publication — they’ll sign almost anything. And often do, from what I can ascertain.
Caveat Creator.
If we sign bad contracts and/or fail to do our homework, that’s nobody’s fault but ours.
Sort of like all the people who signed AR mortgages and got put out of their homes. Lots of people want to blame the banks for this, and there is a new phrase — predatory lending — that pretends to make it all the fault of coniving financiers.
The coniving financiers couldn’t have done a damned thing w/o people rushing in to buy homes they couldn’t afford, because they weren’t their own best business managers and allowed other people to assure them there’d be no problem, and suddenly all that inattention to fine print is coming back to bite them in the butt when they least expect it.
Do corporations screw artists over? Constantly.
But not without the artists having consented on paper first.
Well said, Brad. Great debate, all. Fun post, Dean!
You have done a very masterful job of over selling the doom and gloom.
Some random points (no particular order):
(1) News media is about current affairs. Time Warner, et all, have more to fear in the blogosphere’s ability to get “man on the street” instant coverage than they have to fear in a dip in resale rights to yesterday’s news.
(2) People are already making money by “giving it away”. If you haven’t already, try quantifying how much your own blog – which you don’t charge us to read – boosts your back sales.
(3) Your average consumer is more comfortable buying from the source, or a reputable reseller, than downloading via the virus-net otherwise labeled peer-to-peer networks.
(4) Specific to books, the same pressures that keep the wood-pulp-publishers in business apply, regardless of copyright. People don’t like sitting down to read long bodies of text on their computer–they like the experience of professionally bound books. Even at $10 a book, it’s cheaper to buy the professionally produced product than to print it your own self – just in material cost. That makes no mention of the frustration in reading something with piss-poor proofing.
Are you going to have reprinters trying to jack the latest copy of the next big thing? Yeah, that’s going to happen. And, yes, that will probably drive authors away from the traditional, copyright protected publishing system, and more towards the license-driven software system.
The source code on software may very well be copy protected now, but that point becomes moot once a user accepts the software-use license. The person accepting the license agreement accepts the contract granting permission to use the software. It wouldn’t take much for a professional author to line up the contracts for staff, set up a website, and contract with a reputable publisher — with a nice, hefty penalty clause for attempting to jack the author’s books — and sell their works that way. The user doesn’t accept the license then he doesn’t get to view the book/movie/music album/what-have-you.
Pretty much, copyright laws just take away the burden of drafting individual contracts and non-disclosure agreements in the process of getting the intellectual property to market, while providing to the originator a monopoly on the fruits of his thinking.
I won’t get into how seriously skewed AWAY from the public good that Disney Corp., Sonny Bono, RIAA and MPAA have taken copyright. I will, however, mention that the only reason copyright exists is that there is still a case to be made for copyrights promoting the public good through encouraging a professional class of thinkers to build up cultural captial.
Capital doesn’t do any good sitting in a vault, locked up for so long that it falls to dust on the opening of the vault door. Capital is intended for circulation to pave the way for more capital to be created. Cultural capital, especially, builds bridges between disseparate groups of people.
“Oh, say, can you see,
By the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed
By the twilight’s last gleaming …”
How many people do you know who don’t experience a bit of wonder and national pride when their national anthem plays?
At the end of the day, intellectual creators are paid for what they produce, and what they produce is not limited to just the words put on a page, the music they make, the plays or movies that they produce, or the software they develop. Intellectual creators, with the media they make, forge and dissect connections in our communities.
I’m in agreement that the designers of the US Constitution were dead on target with creation of intellectual _property_ rights to go along with physical property rights – at the time the USC was crafted. I also remember Spider Robinson’s story “Melancholy Elephants” (which, apropos this discussion is available free here: http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm ). Somewhere between no copyright and perpetual copyright is the ideal, or a moving ideal that will ebb and flow with changing “societal attitudes.”
David D. Friedman, in his new book “Future Imperfect,” goes into very good detail about the use of encryption systems to help buyers know that they are purchasing the original good. He implies that because of the value of protecting the link between the author and his/her product, there is a big economic incentive to stay ahead of the hackers. If I were purchasing a story/product that was purported to have been created by Dean Wesley Smith, I would want evidence that this was true. Dean Wesley Smith, on the flip side, would very much want to be sure that he is getting paid his cut from the royalties. Every problem creates wealth for those who solve it. In a world without copyright, there would be a huge economic incentive to get the same benefit currently enjoyed by authors, and by readers.
Our host hints at the value of editors – since they are truly valuable, then there would still be a market for them, for critics, and for most of the components of publishing that already exist. Few people want to read the entire slush pile to find the gems. They would pay someone else for that, as they do now. However, the parts of publishing that currently go on behind the scenes would become more apparent to readers as they sorted through and learned which editors, critics and the rest they prefer. Over time, however, the infrastructure of publishing would fade back into the woodwork as people tried, failed and succeeded to develop quick and seamless methods of getting high quality stories delivered to their inbox at a price they were willing to pay.
I don’t believe that life after copyright would be as dire as our host predicts. Well, maybe at first, but not for long. I believe that enough people want Dean Wesley Smith original stories that there would be economic incentive to develop free market methods to the service currently provided by the government enforcement of copyright licensing.
On the flip side, I find it a little disturbing that Mickey Mouse is copyrighted for the next thousand years or so, but once I remember that I don’t really want to own any Disney products, my perturbations ease away. One only needs to look into history of Siegel and Schuster compared to that of Bob Kane to realize that most who are “exploited by the system” are more often exploited by their own ignorance.
The behavior of RIAA and the discussion of how much more Michael Jackson was willing to pay for licensing rights to Paul McCartney’s work than was Paul McCartney himself is very good, real world evidence of the value of those rights. If the government is no longer involved in the enforcement of those rights, private vendors will step up to help authors and their licensees set up and enforce mutually beneficial agreements. There’s just too much money in it.
Brad, Kristin, I couldn’t agree more with both of you. Thanks!
Cheers, Dean
Barry, I couldn’t agree more. Thanks.
Cheers, Dean
JM, you picked the wrong example for your point I’m afraid. The reason McCartney didn’t retain his copyrights in the first place is that he signed a bad contract and had a really bad manager. Even with that, he got paid HUGE sums for those songs originally, and then when he went to buy them back, got outbid by Jackson.
McCartney made money on his songs, and will continue to make money on his songs, even though some of the Beatles songs he wrote he doesn’t “control.” Doesn’t mean he’s not making money off of them. Enough from them and his songs since that his 34 million bid for them and a bunch of others in the catalog wasn’t enough to outbid another copyright holder, Jackson, who made his money on writing songs and patenting moves and everything else. And someone mentioned Jackson would make 1 million per concert. Great, but compared to the hundreds of millions his copyrights have earned his estate since his death, his kids and mother and a bunch of charities are damned lucky the copyright law is what it is right now.
So, it seems my little exercise has got some people thinking on both sides of copyright issues. That is good. It was fun. Too bad as many people didn’t get excited about how fantastically wasteful the returns system is when I wrote about that and went to congress to get it stopped. Ah, well, hot button issues are always more fun I guess.
Thanks everyone for the comments. Great stuff on both sides.
Cheers
Dean
Very nice, I’ll be directing folks over this way to look at this post.
Internet as slush pile, musicians performing for patrons and putting out free work to promote their concerts, actors flocking to cable.
That sounds like 2012!!!
Old post, but I found it interesting how most of this has come true. Few people respect copyright, though it is a necessity. That being said, people can still make money.
EEP, Never meant to address the “information wants to be free” people. As a person who makes my living off of copyright and entertainment, I have pretty much dismissed that thinking. As you said, this was just a thought exercise, more to make newer writers understand the value of learning copyright than anything else. Cheers, Dean
Orion, well, as a person who makes my living with copyright, not much I can say to that rant. Everyone is free to do what they want with their work, even give it away. I tend to like to sell my work. Just different paths. I won’t shove my world on yours if you don’t try to shove your world on me. This was just an entertaining thought exercise about the sudden vanishing of copyright laws around the world. Won’t happen, thankfully, but I hope it was at least fun to read, which is what I do this all for. Have fun with your world.
Cheers
Dean
Grant, actually, think of copyright as a property right, which it is in many ways under the world’s laws. You live in a house with kids, and have worked hard to build that home for your family and make them secure with the home. Then suddenly you die and because your home can pass to your family, they are still secure. But if instead your home became owned by everyone and anyone could come in and force you out and your family had lost all the value in all your work, would you be as inclined to work as hard on that home? Nope. The 70 Years just allows your immediate family to keep your work and keep it in print. Both good for your family and for your work. Cheers, Dean
Thankfully, it won’t happen the way I played it out. Lots of folks seem to believe that. I’m afraid I don’t. I believe, actually, it would go down even worse than I played out.
What so many seem to forget is freedom of ownership brings freedom of use and thus no way an author could ever show to anyone for any reason his work without the assumption it would be taken and used. Sure, I buy subscription and license-based would try to cope with some of the massive lack of protection, but contracts have little effect on anyone. My point on newspapers were not that they will survive in this current system. Of course they won’t when it is now cheaper for a newspaper to give every subscriber a free Kindle than produce the paper for the same amount of time in print form and deliver it. The copyright protects the form, the delivery system. Sure, cable news would continue, sure ads would continue, sure much of that would move onward, but if you don’t think that government control wouldn’t step into this empty void left, you haven’t studied the history of political systems.
Our founding fathers of this country understood the value of the ownership of copyright as a very base factor of our government and society. Doubt me, go learn constitutional law and history. It is there for a very real reason. We might not agree in the degrees of where copyright has gone being good or bad. Fine. We can agree to disagree. As an owner of many years of my hard labor over building my art, I’m personally damned happy someone can’t just take it and use it.
So, as I have always said about these pretend articles, they are nothing more than a look forward by me, just my opinion. But my opinion comes from owning hundreds and hundreds of copyrights that I spent my valuable money and time to create. I am personally very happy that others might gain from my work after I am gone. That way my work might stay in print long after I have skipped on to the next place.
And as I have learned from having employees for decades, the better your pay them, the better you treat them, the harder they work for you and the more loyal they become. Pay me for my work and I’ll keep creating it. Stop paying me and since I have to put food on the table, the unpaying work will stop and I will find something to do that does pay for the food. It really is that simple.
Cheers
Dean