The Demise of Copyright
This particular Porcine Aviator, having a keen interest in technology and issues thereof, has over the years bored many people with the observation that copyright's dead. Killed by the digital revolution. In my opinion, those who are trying desperately to prop it up are probably doomed to fail.
One of the nicer things in life is finding someone who agrees with your unfashionable ideas. Even better if it's printed in the mainstream media.
In today's SMH IT Section, Graeme Philipson says much the same thing.
The concept of copyright was developed to protect printers in 17th-century England, and was greatly strengthened by the film and music industries and wealthy publishing companies in the US over the past 50 years. But digital technology, and the ease with which all media can now be stored, copied and propagated, has rendered these antiquated and anachronistic laws increasingly unenforceable.
Very true. And for every new technology adopted to prevent the copying of content, there's a pimply smart-arse tech-head who will devise a way to get round it, usually within days of the technology being released.
Proponents of copyright, who are fortunately dwindling in number, often use the spurious argument that without copyright there would be nothing to protect artists' rights, and that creativity would die. This argument pretends that copyright is the natural order of things, when it is an aberration in human history.The greatest writers, composers and artist of the classical era operated with no copyright protection at all. That never stopped Shakespeare writing, or Bach composing, or Michelangelo painting. The difference is that all these artists, and most others, worked on a performance-based model - create the work, get paid once, move on to the next one.
That is still the way most musicians, writers and painters make their living today. The proportion that get a significant amount of their income from royalties is minuscule. The real money goes to the "industry" that has grown up to extract money from consumers through a complex distribution system that digital technology has now rendered irrelevant.
Yep. You can't copy a live performance. I can't feel too sorry for artists who have to perform for a living rather than just sit back and watch the royalties roll in.
Philipson doesn't mention it, but the only thing that may slow the demise of copyright are innovations such as Microsoft's 'Trustworthy Computing.' Using modified hardware and digital certificates, new PCs purchased in a few years time may be engineered to only run certified software. The ramifications of this technology are too many to describe here (look here instead), but, in short, it will entrench established software vendors' products and make it much harder to run free, open source software of the type I'm using at this very moment to create this article.
The effect of new 'secure' technology may be that two parallel technologies may exist side by side. One group of tech savvy users will use an older type 'insecure' internet and hardware, while the not so savvy users will be forced into using propretry software and pay handsomely for the privilege.
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