A rchive Date
[ 11-06-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Computers ]
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[Intellectual rights may be Net casualty
By DIANE FRANCIS
The Financial Post
Saturday, 10-Jun-00 09:46:02
In just 15 minutes, a ranking member of Canada's geekdom demonstrated to me how the Internet is eventually going to destroy much of the value of intellectual property. He downloaded a pirated copy of a feature-length film currently showing in theatres around the world. I picked the film. He got it for nothing.
How was this obtained? He speculated that a piece of technology was attached by the pirate to a movie theatre's projector and the film was simply copied.
Such piracy is not restricted to films. The same phenomenon is rampant in the music business where CDs are swapped or given away for free.
"This may be the end of a 90-year window when it was possible to make money off recorded music," commented novelist William Gibson this week in a speech at the TEDCity conference about the New Economy and the arts.
He said his son has collected arcane ethnic music from around the world over the years by searching out obscure CDs and paying handsomely for them. No longer.
What's interesting about this trend is that the pirates are usually not profiteers. They believe that cultural and intellectual property belong to humanity and many go to great lengths just to provide people with free copies of things.
In other words, what we are seeing is the creation of the world's first Virtual Library for movies and music offered by cyber volunteers.
Naturally, this has capitalists up in arms and there are plenty of court cases attacking such practices. But it won't help. It's impossible to stop because property now changes hands in seconds while the court system takes years. The pirates are 21st century and the lawyers and lawmakers are 18th century.
While frightening to some, this new reality will not destroy all creation of wealth through inventiveness or artistry. People, including this techno-pirate who downloaded the film, will still go out to the theatre. People will still buy newspapers. They will still listen to commercial radio and television and still pay for CDs.
But there will be a continuing erosion of receipts and royalties as the Internet becomes culture's Virtual Library, providing free distribution and access to anyone in the world.
This erosion of revenue will simply transform the cultural industries under attack. Musicians may have to put up with poor CD sales, but will make money through live appearances, endorsements or merchandising.
The free distribution of culture won't remove the incentive to create or invent either, anymore than libraries have reduced the number of authors or books available.
For starters, the satisfaction of creation and invention is reward enough to real creators and inventors. Authors such as I have never seen the library or the photocopy machine as a threat. These distributive enhancers are our friends. That's because creators want their work viewed by as many persons as possible.
Besides, the accumulation of wealth through culture is a 20th- century phenomenon. Never before in history could a writer or a musician or an engineer become as rich as a Rockefeller.
In the case of the written word, book writers can make livings, even fortunes, because the market is global and literacy is higher than ever in history. In addition, authors benefit from mass media that publicizes their works, giving them the biggest audiences in history.
In the case of music, enormous wealth has only been attainable because the distribution of music has been through radio and television networks. These enterprises have been captives to the countries in which they operate because they are licensed. This means they are subject to laws that force them to pay royalties to the creators of intellectual property.
Likewise, it has only been in the 20th century that a screenplay writer or an actor could become wealthy. What's made that happen is that Hollywood has come to dominate movie making worldwide so pervasively that movie theatres around the world have become captive to its distribution decisions.
This will change. The Blair Witch Project (made for US$35,000 by amateurs and unexpectedly grossing US$150-million) is an example. Blair Witch showed that Hollywood can be knocked off as more and more people gain the expertise to make films without gigantic budgets and to air them on the Internet. While Blair Witch was snapped up in the early days by Hollywood distributors, the fact is that it proved that the Dream Factory's near-monopoly is penetrable -- as are its movie stars. Both will be increasingly under attack and should be.
Meanwhile, it's impossible to collect royalties from cultural products transmitted over the Internet. The telephone lines that the Internet uses are captive and telecoms are licensed by local governments. But these telephone monopolies cannot be held responsible for paying royalties on cultural transmissions because they have no control over users. Telephone franchises are small and local. Internet transmission crosses national and telecoms borders because it is global.
So, while intellectual property rights as we know them may not die altogether, we are definitely starting to see the beginning of the end. Stay tuned.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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