"Everything open source" would take away the incentive for people to create essentially all media professionally: software, music, TVs/movies, podcasts, journalism, and more. Many industries would be destroyed if they didn't have the right to sell their creations (if anyone could copy them and give them away). I personally enjoy the media created by many organizations such as NPR, which made the article we're reading now. I enjoy many audio and written books and podcasts and video games. The professional software industry would vanish, as would the entire video games industry, and NPR. Programs for creating art and video would stop being made for sale.
If there was no IP protection, anyone could redistribute NPR's podcasts and news articles while stripping the advertising from them. Advertisers would stop sponsoring NPR, and its budget would diminish substantially. It would stop producing quality content like this article. The ability to lawfully distribute free copies of all video games and video content would diminish their sales to a fraction of today, and shut those industries down. The only media industries left would be ones based on live performance / live display.
I'd like to retain the incentives for these creators to continue thriving by publishing good work, which means retaining these intellectual property protections. I think we can fix the problem that appears to exist in this situation in other ways, such as by strictly curtailing the rights of equipment manufacturers to restrict what purchasers can do via licenses, and by buffing the first sale doctrine to include right of repair, and perhaps creating or strengthening legal requirements that when you purchase a physical good, must not hinder the ability to repair it, and the software needed to operate the good must be included in the price and must operate (must not be intentionally time-limited) for a reasonable period of time. The duration of copyright should also be significantly reduced, to something like 20 years maximum.
I go around telling people what I think of copyright all the time, and this argument is one that I hear a lot.
But I don't buy it. The body of open source content available today is proof that your argument is at the very least incomplete. Plenty of people do give their time away for free to make better things available to people without monetary benefit.
A key to my argument is as follows: people who give away their work tend to be on the wealthier end of the spectrum with some ability to give their time away - a single mother of four who works 60 hours a week probably isn't submitting pull requests in her spare time.
So then you say I have a flaw - only wealthy people can contribute to a world without IP laws. But again I disagree. In the world without IP laws, I believe deeply that the wealth we already have would be more evenly distributed, and the floor of minimum wealth would be much higher. I think in a world without IP laws, so many people would be so much wealthier that they could afford to voluntarily support those who still cannot support themselves.
I should also point out that there's absolutely still an incentive to create things even without IP protection, so I disagree with your argument on its face. Certainly there is a greater incentive to create when creators can legally bar others from selling their works, but that does not mean the incentive without IP laws is zero. To the contrary, innovators maintain first mover advantage and are free to build brand awareness. I'd rather buy something from a creator than a copycat, since the copycat is more likely to cut corners that materially impact the quality of the offering.
On balance I believe we would see MORE wealth and more innovation without IP laws, and while I may be wrong I think it's important to question the conventional wisdom that IP laws help innovation. I think in many ways they harm it.
Try making friends with a musician. Make sure they're a local act or play in a local band. Often they have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay, and would love to do so with their art but can't because the economics don't support it. Almost invariably, they talk about how it used to be better, back when people bought physical phonograph albums; among the musicians I know the politics are uniform: strong copyright helps them make money, digital (including Napster and streaming) has destroyed much of the value of their work, and some form of unobtrusive DRM would be a boon to struggling artists.
Just because you don't think copyright protects your interests, doesn't mean it doesn't protect someone's.
I am explicitly considering people totally unlike me, and I seriously think the musicians of the world would be better off without copyright too. Aside from the major rockstars, most artists I imagine are concerned with putting food on their tables, maintaining shelter over their heads, and keeping clothes on their backs.
I claim that without intellectual property the average person would have significantly more material wealth, the cost of living would be lower, and it would be much easier to maintain a living off of patronage than it is today.
My personal long term life goal is to understand how to reduce the marginal cost of supporting a human life to zero, so "we can have socialism for free" as I sometimes say. This necessarily requires that we eliminate artificially inflated costs, which is what intellectual property is. It requires other things, including more automation, but that will come. The issue is that more automation WITH intellectual property law means the wealthy of today will maintain their power over the poor tomorrow, continuing to artificially inflate prices for their own profits at the expense of average people. I believe that would be much more difficult to do if there were no intellectual property protections.
From what I read, it wasn't that much better in the past - record labels were the gatekeepers and ate most of the profits.
But frankly, and with no offense to musicians out here, nobody is entitled to their business model working. Some things can make sustainable living, some can't. Turning otherwise infeasible business models into working ones with regulation is something that should be done with care, and should be done to benefit society, not individuals.
From my perspective (having played in local acts), the decline of the local musician career more points to a larger combination of converging trends:
- Increasing technology (eg: there is much less need for certain careers. An example is the local mid-grade demo studio; these have largely closed with computers able to easily exceed the old demo studio's quality)
- Corporate homogenization. In the 1990s, radio stations merged and became more national. This resulted in stations paying less attention to local markets. The same can be said for record labels. The same can be said for local music venues,
which in some places are also in decline. (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/09/the-slow-deat...) Ergo: there is less room for "regional hits" and regional music scenes.
- A huge increase in entertainment choice, lowering overall demand.
- Various entertainment trends that hurt certain types of musicians more than others (eg: In pop, today there is much less of a focus on band-oriented music, replaced with DJ/electronic type music)
None of this had much to do with IP. In fact, streaming / Napster / etc. may actually help some local musicians a touch (particularly in more niche genres), by allowing musicians to gain exposure in a way that is outside the standard corporate music environment (replacing the old tape trading circles of before).
Of course, exposure alone doesn't pay the bills. And there's certainly a case that streaming / Napster / etc. hurt the income of established musicians that relied heavily on album sales for their paychecks. But to me, it's strange when local musicians focus on only that (and yes I have heard the same from some). That route of income didn't really apply even in pre-Internet times, until you got "signed". (And if you weren't biz savvy, you could easily get screwed by that route too, see Albini's famous rant -- http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music )
You are ignoring technological change over time. As you go back in time, the time and effort to make copies goes up, the costs of distribution goes up, and the speed of distribution goes down. All of those raise the natural advantage that the original producer has over copiers.
For example, when Charles Dickens was writing and publishing his novels in serial form in magazines he didn't have any significant problem with unauthorized copies in the United States even though at the time the United States copyright law did not cover imported foreign works such as his.
That was because by the time the unauthorized publishers got a hold of the next chapter and could get started with the typesetting for making their own copies, the authorized copies for the United States were already sailing across the Atlantic. They makes of unauthorized copies would have to wait for another transatlantic sailing to get theirs to the US.
The result was Dickens' authorized copies were the only ones available in the US for something like a month or so. By the time unauthorized copies could make it over, something like 95% of the people who were interested in the story had already read it in the authorized magazine.
Google "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" and you can find an essay by United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer written in 1970, when he was still an academic, arguing that these kind of natural advantages of being first to market had generally been enough incentive for creators. There have been a couple essays in response too, which should show up on that search.
Going back to "...limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" would do wonders to making the situation w/ copyright better.
Yes, reining copyright terms in, putting in strong protections for individuals and hobbyists so that copyright is irrelevant to anyone with less than $1M in revenue, and liberalizing fair use (which unfortunately probably also means seriously overhauling our judicial processes to be not horrendously slow and expensive) would make copyright far more tolerable.
IMO the ideal would be something like 10 year copyright terms, with restrictions like requiring all software subject to copyright protection to submit its source.
Less than $1M? Then my personal business would evaporate because everyone would copy it for free. I provide value to people and they pay me and it supports my family. You're saying I should stop doing that work and become, I don't know, a bricklayer instead? I won't be able to do open source work because that doesn't generate money.
Nahh, if that's the case, then even more onerous DRM would take hold. And that would be because copyright woudn't exist for a multitude of people. And DRM would be the enforced control, rather than the threat of massive software copyright lawsuit.
And likely, remote kill would also be implemented to nuke the software from the owner's point of view, in cases like alleged breach of contract and "pissed off owner' sort of reasons.. Like what Garagdet did when a customer posted a bad review of their IoT crap.
I wasn't clear. I meant that copyright violations generally would be something that people with less than 1 million in revenue didn't have to worry about, not that it's protections would be irrelevant to them.
If there was no IP protection, anyone could redistribute NPR's podcasts and news articles while stripping the advertising from them. Advertisers would stop sponsoring NPR, and its budget would diminish substantially. It would stop producing quality content like this article. The ability to lawfully distribute free copies of all video games and video content would diminish their sales to a fraction of today, and shut those industries down. The only media industries left would be ones based on live performance / live display.
I'd like to retain the incentives for these creators to continue thriving by publishing good work, which means retaining these intellectual property protections. I think we can fix the problem that appears to exist in this situation in other ways, such as by strictly curtailing the rights of equipment manufacturers to restrict what purchasers can do via licenses, and by buffing the first sale doctrine to include right of repair, and perhaps creating or strengthening legal requirements that when you purchase a physical good, must not hinder the ability to repair it, and the software needed to operate the good must be included in the price and must operate (must not be intentionally time-limited) for a reasonable period of time. The duration of copyright should also be significantly reduced, to something like 20 years maximum.