One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free

@31: Modern copyright law is a minor element in the history of makind. Libraries and authors existed for millenia before copyright was invented, and everyone the world over thought having one’s work copied by others was the highest level of honor. But when finally, finally technology advanced to the point of making copying easier, those in charge saw it and thought how… inconvenient… that would be. And copy restriction arised, and morality was inverted, so that what once was good became evil, and what once was evil became good.

Think: dictatorial and censorhip-prone governments the world over would love nothing more than if unbreakable DRM and unavoidable GRM were the standard widely and globally imposed over every single intellectual work. For example, Iran: how would freedom loving Iranians access the very, very heretic US thought? The US forbids Americans from having commerce with them, directly or indirectly. Iranians cannot properly purchase any US intellectual product, neither that which is “only” for fun (but promotes awareness of alternative lifestyles anyway) nor that which explicitly helps them fight tyranny. If they get it at all is by practicing civil disobediency against both their home country, by reading that which is forbidden in there, as well as agains the US, by accessing that which US officials deem they should be forbidden from seeing. Perfect DRM coupled with perfect GRM would help sustain Iranian restrictions against freedom of thought much better than the Iranian government itself ever could. In fact, they’d be able to point at it and say: “See? It isn’t us who don’t want you to get it! It’s them!”. How convenient wouldn’t that be?

That’s the problem with copyright maximalism: to protect commercial interests it implements legal tools that result in serious political consequences.

Here’s a better and much easier alternative: those who can and will buy, you serve to the best of your possibilities so that they always prefer to buy. This is what Tor is mostly doing, as no matter how easy it is to get their works for “free” most people out there still prefer to purchase them through official channels. Simply put, it feels right to do so, and most people go with that. As for those who cannot (in the strong sense of the word), consider them all members of a huge library and either don’t worry about them or try to get some tax benefit or something to compensate for them. Finally, about the middle ground of those who can purchase but don’t unless they have no alternative, yep, you lose some minor revenue from them you’d otherwise get, but global culture as a whole benefits. The net effect is positive, worth the minor loss of control, and everyone can go to bed with clear consciences.

The argument is in no way so clear cut, specially because legality, morality and justice aren’t correlated. Here are three points to consider:

First, copyright grants an individual possession over all other’s property, in that everyone the world over are prevented from using the material goods they legitimately worked to purchased and came to possess in the way they see fit, and even though using them would result in $0 victimless crime. This goes from absurdist to fun when one looks at how the industry makes bogus arguments about profit losses that feel very close to this joke I heard a while ago: The husband arrives home later, panting but smiling. The wife asks what happened, and he says he arrived later at the bus stop and, although he ran after the bus, it went away, but that he was happy because he then decided to walk home and in so doing saved the bus fare. The wife criticizes him, for had he ran after a taxi instead of a bus he’d have saved even more. So, no damage, no crime, which at least is recognized in that copyright infringement is almost nowhere a crime, but only a civil matter.

Second, that the law is defective in that while it grants a right, it fails to establish a corresponding duty, making it unbalanced. No, with every right must come a duty, and with a right to restrict copies must come a duty to make available copies for a proper fee, a copyduty. Failing in his copy duty, as is usually the case with GRM, the copy rights holder should see his right temporarily suspended, there where he isn’t fulfilling his duty, until he does.

There are other imbalances such as with duration maximalism, a.k.a. the way Disney brib… lobbies for extensions whenever Mickey is almost entering public domain. Both things violate the social contract, and thus it becomes morally proper to react.

Finally, the fact of the matter is that the law already allows people to use copyrighted works in many ways the author might disagree with. Radio can play any song it wants and pay in bulk. Libraries can lend any book they own to as many people want to read it. People can share the (physical) intellectual goods they own with anyone. DRM is an attempt to workaround this, and as is the case with the Internet, it ends up workarounding these workarounds. So, the law hasn’t updated to include in such arrangements the parallel nature of digital sharing as opposed to the serial nature of physical sharing? Well, global culture is making it adapt no matter how much it doesn’t want to or how many it punishes for doing what comes naturally to almost everyone. The Internet is the ultimate library. It’s the supreme toybox, basically the same our mothers point to and say “You should share your toys!” (and where are those who tell their children “Sharing is wrong, you must never share!”?). Once the powerful lobbies preventing this recognition from happening get disabled by cultural forces beyond even their lobbiestest of powers, some radio-like scheme will be devised to properly compensate authors under a sharing culture. Too bad until that day civil disobedience and the pain of the innocent it’ll be.

And thus the culture battles proceed.

By the way: if you haven’t read Cory Doctorow, one of the authors mentioned in the article, seek some of his books. They are all highly fictionalized accounts of some of the points I make, showing, as the excellent distopic author he is, the unwanted consequences positions similar to yours can bring about if/when sufficiently strengthened.

@46: “That fact is copyright exists to allow a creator to protect their work and thereby profit from it.”

No, that’s incorrect. Copyright exists for a single purpose, at least insofar as the US Constitution is concerned: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (“useful art” meaning technology).

Sure, it’s been progressively distorted over time so that at some point your understanting became the norm, but that’s a fairly recent historical aberration that the Internet is justly eroding one step at a time, no matter how much copyright maximalists wish to legislate culture away. In the end freedom wins.

By the way, I find if funny when people bring sentiments and emotion into what should be a purely rational discouse. What does subjective evaluations such as finding something “offensive” has to do with anything? Besides, I am not talking about invading computers, only about publicly available content. Someone invading your computer would be trespassing and should be criminally persecuted.

Now if you want a moral argument here it is: when you contract someone to do something for you, let’s say fix something broken in your car, do you keep paying him in perpetuity and/or subject yourself to arbitrary conditions set by him on how you should use your car in future? Or do you pay him for the effort employed and for the duration of him employing said effort? So, why should authors have an elitist privilege on their particular kind of work? As I see it it’s perfectly reasonable for an author who spent 5 years working on a book to earn 5 years worth of wages, proportional to the quality of said work, but no more. This notion that “intellectual work” is somehow on a class apart is wholly undeserved. Work is work. Do it, get paid for it, the end. None of this nonsense of being paid, and paid again, and paid again, and paid again, and paid again… for the same piece of previous work.

The only just duration for any kind of copyright-system is that which provides this return on investment, and no more. Any more, and it’s unjust with society. Any less, and it’s unjust with the author. We’re so far away from the sweet spot it isn’t even funny.

@48: “It can directly influence how willing people are to even consider what you have to say.”

Let’s try this in reverse then. Should I find it offensive that, after reading glowing reviews about a work, watching ads abouts that work, finding myself craving that work, when I finally go to Amazon or another e-store, money in hands, I’m greeted with a warning stating: “Content not available in your region”? Why yes, I should. And I do. As a society we’ve learned that not selling to someone because of his/her gender, race, ethnicity, religion, political view or sexual orientation is wrong, so how come we think discriminating on the basis of where one lives is? “Because the author doesn’t want to sell to (region)” is no better an argument than “because the owner doesn’t want to sell to (discrimation criteria)ers in his store”.

No surprise then that I‘m not quite willing to hear people arguing for this thing I call “geographism”, eh? ;-)

“The guy repairing the car is doing work for hire. The guy writing a book might not be. The guy repairing a car is doing you a service, the guy writing the book is not . ( . . . )”

True enough, but most of what’s culturally produced out there is work for hire, and businesses take advantage of that. I’d consider your argument valid if copyright couldn’t be transfered away from the creator, but only licensed, and only non-exclusively so. As things are most restrictions come from middlemen who purchased the right, not the actual creative source, and thus become conceptually meaningless.

Besides, nothing prevents alternative modes of compensation taking into consideration late popularity. Publishers could be made to compulsorily contribute to a fund reserved for payment to creators similar to how radio does to musicians. Possible new business models abound. Only those afraid of change, hostile to progress and conservative to the bone on their settled ways of doing things fear and oppose it.

“What you are suggesting is something that could easily discourage creative endeavors.”

Now, this is another level of argumentation, and luckily one on which scientific research could actually be made. It’s the utilitarian approach to copyright. The idea is simply that, while as you argued it’s quite difficult to measure how much work went into producing a specific piece of intellectual work, it isn’t difficult to measure the aggregate production of intellectual works and correlate them with law protections. The idea is to change copyright duration and measure the effects of these changes in intellectual productivity. You’d know you’re below the sweet spot at the point the output started to decrease, although in fact one could start measuring an increase as the lenght diminished due to increased prevalence of mashups and derivative works. In any case the duration after the experimenting period would remain adjustable, and governments would be able to keep adjusting it up and down so as to keep global society in maximum cultural production mode, thus benefiting the world at large.

Alas, evidently no one wants science to interfere with politics, passionate discourses and feelings of entitlement, so we’re still decades if not centuries away from true scientific law making. Too bad.