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Law in the Internet Society
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The Stop Online Piracy Act: the blindness continues-- By DiegodelaPuente - 15 Nov 2011The Futile Stop Online Piracy Act's discussion
U.S. Congress’ discussion about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) does not contribute to the Net’s growth; on the contrary, it distracts public attention to the real issue: copyright is no longer needed in the Internet society where we live in. SOPA tries to expand the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders’ power allowing seeking court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Without understanding our actual technological sharing world without frontiers and different ownership rules, Representative Lamar Smith, one of the chief sponsors of the bill, said, “SOPA is needed because rogue websites are stealing and selling American innovations”. Moreover, even SOPA’s most famous detractors, Google, Facebook, AOL and Twitter, are only arguing about Internet censorship or chilling effects on speech, rather than proposing a radical change to the actual copyright framework in accordance with new technological trends, which is intended by many recognized scholars and scientists, such as Kevin Kelly (Wired Magazine), Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Mike Masnick (Techdirt) and James Allsworth (Harvard Business School).
Unfortunately, this new vision of content industries (film, television, books, software, music and others), with the absence of copyright law has been rejected by content industries monopolies represented by the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America or Business Software Alliance and the American Government itself as Wired Magazine have revealed recently. Principally, these monopolies feared to loose the annual millionaire earnings they received under the current ownership system and disguise their intentions stating that SOPA will protect artist’s intellectual property, including the resultant revenue and jobs. Moreover, in respect to the music industry, Dr. Robert Levine (former Billboard executive editor), said that the best way to save artists’ jobs is to strengthen copyright law. I disagree with that mistaken idea and will try to prove that without copyright, artists will continue to have incentives to innovate and produce culture.
Stop Online Piracy Act
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
- http://americancensorship.org
The new model
Copyright is outdated and lacks of effectiveness, because it does not consider the social changes that technology has generated. When Copyright was born it was believed that monopolistic financial incentives stimulate artistic production and that it will guarantee artists a decent income and subsidize certain professions. As Ithiel de Sola Pool conceived in 1983, with the arrival of electronic reproduction, copyright practices become unworkable. In recent years, some scholars such as Danny Colligan had written about why copyright is detrimental to society nowadays, referring that Copyright enforcement necessarily entails monitoring of all computer communications, and therefore the destruction of online privacy, erodes the public domain and free culture, criminalizes a large percentage of the population and poses large economic costs to society. Also economists, such as Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, from Washington University, published a book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, where they described that the current copyright system discourages and prevents inventions from entering the marketplace. In this new age, content is information and on a computer, information is anything that can be digitized, that is, encoded in a sequence of zeros and ones. In that order of ideas, information now has two important properties that modify the foundations of Copyright: it is both non-exclusive (any number of people can access and use it simultaneously) and non-rivalrous (the fact that one person has more information does not imply that another person has less).
Under this new scenario, the ownership idea must be change for access, sharing and selling added value. For example, Michael Masnik explains that people do not buy “a movie”; they buy the “experience” of going to the theater. They like the differentiated value they can get from bundled goods and services that helps justify a price that is more than $0. Kevin Kelly clarifies and gives more detail that under actual technological circumstances, the idea is not to sell books or music copies, because they must be available to everyone, instead artists and industry rather should follow the path of attention to consumer preferences and provide intangible value to the content in order to gain incomes. In that sense, Kelly defined eight categories of intangible value that consumers will buy when they consider that it is worth value to pay for: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity (quality), accessibility, embodiment, patronage and findability. These generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset. In accordance to this new economical model, and proposing the freemium business model (combination of free and premium), Fred Wilson stated that the market will identify the right point to pay money to information providers, when they see a real value: “free gets you to the place where you can ask to get paid.” Wilson’s model realizes that the cost of delivering many services over the Internet has decreased significantly from what it cost to deliver them in the analog world. Thus, once you have built a large audience providing free content through word of mouth, referral networks or marketing techniques, then you can offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.
Back in 1997 and in a more economical approach, Eric Schlachter described that the profit-maximizing price on the Internet will be where marginal revenue equals marginal cost, because intellectual property will be cross subsidized by other products in a manner sufficient to cover the fixed costs associated with intellectual property creation and distribution. Under this statement, Schlachter considered that a market price of zero for intellectual property can still create long-term economic profits by means of advertising, sales of upgrade models and sale of complementary technology. Boldrin and Levine also contribute to this economical discussion in demonstrating potential profitability in an age of unrestricted copying. In their previously referred book, they discuss several instances where the absence of copyright has not led to bankruptcy, and in the contrary some industries became profitable. For instance, consumers many often pay to get access to the breaking news stories first, even though the same will eventually be available to the public at a later time. Some actual business models in the music industry that follow this path are Pandora, MOG and Spotify, where users would listen for free, but they would have to submit to a few minutes of advertisement every hour.
New model
- Kevin Kelly, Better than Free (January 31, 2008) (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html)
- Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (November 11, 2005) (http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm)
- Richard Stallman, Misinterpreting Copyright (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html)
- Mike Masnik, Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period, Techdirt (February 15, 2007) (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml)
- Fred Wilson, Freemium and Freeconomics (July 4, 2009) (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and-freeconomics.html)
Conclusions
We have demonstrated that Copyright is no longer needed under our actual Internet Society, where an accessible market is desired. Therefore, our obligation for the next years is to eliminate intellectual monopoly, because a world without copyright would offer the guarantee of a good income to artists, and would protect the public domain of knowledge and creativity. Consumers must not be forced to buy content, when the market is free, consumers will be willing to pay for value-aggregated services.
Information sourcesStop Online Piracy Act - Stop Online Piracy Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act) - http://americancensorship.org - David Kravets, Chief Sponsor Wavers on Web Censorship Bill in Charged Hearing, Wired (November 16, 2011) (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/piracy-blacklisting-bill) - SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) debate: Why are Google and Facebook against it? (November 17, 2011) (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/sopa-stop-online-piracy-act-debate-why-are-google-and-facebook-against-it/2011/11/17/gIQAvLubVN_story.html) - Caitlin Bronson, Online Piracy Act Struggles in Congress (November 29, 2011) (http://www.thirdage.com/news/online-piracy-act-struggles-in-congress_11-29-2011) - Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act Now (November 21, 2011) (http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/11/21/stop-the-stop-online-piracy-act-now.aspx) - Timothy B. Lee, The Stop Online Piracy Act: Big Content's full-on assault against the Safe Harbor, ARS Technica (November 2011) (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/the-stop-online-piracy-act-big-contents-full-on-assault-against-the-safe-harbor.ars - David Cravets, U.S. Copyright Czar Cozied Up to Content Industry, E-Mails Show, Wired (October 14, 2011) (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/copyright-czar-cozies-up) Copyright and Freemium - Kevin Kelly, Better than Free (January 31, 2008) (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html) - Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (November 11, 2005) (http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm) - Richard Stallman, Misinterpreting Copyright (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html) - Mike Masnik, Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period, Techdirt (February 15, 2007) (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923.shtml) - Fred Wilson, Freemium and Freeconomics (July 4, 2009) (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/freemium-and-freeconomics.html) - Fred Wilson, My Favorite Business Model (March 23, 2006) (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/my_favorite_bus.html) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithiel_de_Sola_Pool - Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (1983). (http://books.google.com/books?id=BzLXGUxV4CkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Technologies+of+freedom&hl=en&ei=8M_WTpr_IIbi0QGU2NnoAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) - Eric Schlachter, The Intellectual Property Renaissance in Cyberspace: Why Copyright Law Could Be Unimportant on the Internet, Berkeley Technological Law Journal (1997) (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol12/Schlachter/html/reader.html) - Danny Colligan, What We Lose When We Embrace Copyright (February 11, 2010) (http://questioncopyright.org/what_we_lose_when_we_embrace_copyright) - Melody Walker, Economists say copyright and patent laws are killing innovation; hurting economy (March 5, 2009) (http://www.physorg.com/news155495067.html) - Scott Timberg, Does culture really want to be free? (November 1, 2011) (http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/does_culture_really_want_to_be_free/singleton) - Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel, Imagine a world without copyright, New York Times (October 8, 2005) (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/07/opinion/07iht-edsmiers.html?pagewanted=all) - Nico van EIJK, Legal, Economic and Cultural Aspects of File Sharing (March 30, 2010) (http://www.ivir.nl/publications/vaneijk/Communications&Strategies_2010.pdf) - Mark A. Lemley, Is the Sky Falling Dawn on the Content Industries? (2011) (http://www.jthtl.org/content/articles/V9I1/JTHTLv9i1_Lemley.PDF) - Steven Levy, Facebook, Spotify and the Future of Music (October 21, 2011) (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_music) - Nate Anderson, Big Content to FCC: don't kill our ISP filtering dream!, ARS Technica (2009) (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/09/big-content-still-cant-compete-with-free.ars) - JRC Scientific and Technical Reports, The Future Evolution of the Creative Content Industries (2008) (http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC47964.pdf) - Anita Elberse, Bye Bye Bundles: The Unbundling of Music in Digital Channels (November 1, 2009) (http://www.people.hbs.edu/aelberse/papers/Elberse_2010.pdf) - Scott Berinato, The iTunes Effect and the Future of Content, Havard Business Review (http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/01/the-itunes-effect-and-the-futu.html) - Gerd Leonhard, The Future of the Content Industries (April 2011) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLxEqy3lngk) - Gerd Leonhard, Free & Freemium Business Models (June 2011) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uOsLgTMGqc) Open Source Information - Eric Steven Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-bazaar) - What would Jesus hack? Cybertheology: Just how much does Christian doctrine have in common with the open-source software movement?, The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21527031)You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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