Most Friday afternoons you can find me on This Week in Law. We record at 1pm Central and the video is available live here, archived here, and audio is available here. This past week was lots of fun talking with Fred von Lohmann from the EFF. Host Denise Howell always does a great job, and I also enjoyed talking with guest Jeff Richardson. Hope you’ll tune in from time to time.
May 25, 2010
Great show, Evan. Thanks for posting this. Very interesting discussion. These are some of my thoughts regarding copyright on the internet:
To me, I cannot see an answer to copyright on the web where content creators are protected in the same way they had been before broadband. There’s four big reasons why I think there is no answer for copyright on the web:
(1) Media can now be seamlessly digitally formatted, transferred, and viewed
(2) Distribution channels have been drastically streamlined
(3) Economies of scale are different as millions of people are connected to the internet and there’s no way to police billions, perhaps trillions, of clicks happening each day
(4) The mere ease of use of the internet has completely decimated the business model of mass media (there’s no real barrier to entry because all anyone needs to “steal” massive amounts of movies and music is a cheap computer and an internet connection.
Societal expectations regarding media consumption have warped since the 1990’s because people no longer consume media in a tangible form. Everything now takes place from one screen (movies, music, news, etc.) and a tangible cassette, disc, paper or any other physical “commoditization” practice is simply not the way of future consumption.
The change in consumption practices signal a necessary change in protection practices. The internet is such a “killer” medium, the reality is that media can and is being exchanged freely, openly, and easily and there’s no way to reasonably stop it. You can’t sue everyone who has torrented something. You can’t sue every person who had uploaded something to rapidshare. You can’t sue everyone who has posted a TV show to youtube. There will always be new sites forming that become massively popular that will evade traditional copyright laws. I guess I’m proposing the notion that any media that can be distilled to a digitally transferable and digitally viewable format, has no way of being protected in the internet age. It may seem extreme, but I think it’s a losing battle for content creators these days to control their creative product in the same way artists and productions companies traditionally did. My advice: keep creating, but realize you’re going to have to make your money in a different way.