We live in primitive times (2)

Posted on Wed 14 Jul 10

We’re going to look at copyright. That should thin things out a bit.

Few people care about copyright and most of those who do care only do so because they stand to gain through the exploitation of intellectual property¹². Why should you care? Maybe you shouldn’t but if you want creativity to flourish you may have to care or at least understand. To illustrate how primitive these times are while avoiding a long, boring investigation of the current state of play, we’ll skip forward to a time when hindsight will make today look like a sepia photograph. Say, 2025³.

In 2025 all intellectual property, from a poem to a song, a scribbled sketch to a choreographed performance, a short story to a feature length movie, is uniquely identified. The original creators of all copyright works are linked to each instance of the work as are all other contractually related parties (writers, publishers, distributors, financiers, manufacturers etc). All methods of reproducing or displaying the work are authorised and monitored by a system similar to the internet but far more sophisticated, simpler and ubiquitous.

You receive a regular statement of your IP usage – like a utility bill.

Your statement (obviously not a paper one) details all the IP you have consumed. It includes TV episodes or films you’ve watched, magazine articles read or websites visited, photographs copied, software used and a list of songs you have listened to. It might detail all the IP you have consumed free of charge because the owners had decided to give you a temporary license or an IP distributor had financed the royalty payments by selling advertising. It also details all your recently purchased licenses to consume specific copyrights wherever, whenever and for as many times as you wish. These ‘in perpetuity’ licenses are the equivalent of what buying a CD, or downloading a song used to be except now you own the rights to enjoy the work regardless of whether you have the storage media with the ones and noughts encoded on it in your possession. You can use any playback device (which are so cheap and ubiquitous as to be part of the environment) anywhere in the world and have instant access to all of your licensed IP using your own unique identifier.

All this IP is held as an asset in your account in a specialist IP bank – let’s call it Softbank. It is that account that is accessed for authorisation when you press ‘play’ and that account that would charge you for copyright usage and distribute micro-payments accordingly.

Despite paying for everything, your Softbank monthly bill in 2025 is most likely cheaper than an average person used to spend in 2010 on the mix-match of plastic CD buying, MP3 downloading, license-fee paying, software and cable subscription services and periodical purchases. It’s cheaper for one very good reason – there are no middle-men, no distribution costs and no collection agencies.

You, if you are an IP consumer, receive a Softbank statement that is a list of micro-debits. But if you are a copyright creator you not only see usage debits in your Softbank account but also all the aggregated credits for sales and performances of your copyrights – updated every second. The payments would, in effect go directly from the consumer to the producer using the same system that enables the distribution of the work to the consumer in the first place.

But most of us are no longer simply consumers. With blogs and video mash-ups, crowdsourced projects, original photos, recommendations, wiki contributions, user feedback, surveys and comments – we are all producers and consumers. By 2025 the prosumer will be truly enabled.

As a consumer you get exactly what you want, when and where you want it, a far wider choice than ever before and you pay less. As a prosumer you get total control over your copyrights, full knowledge of what is being consumed, when and where, immediate payment and a much larger percentage of what the consumer pays.

Back in 2010 we have to put up with an antiquated system of statutory licenses, non-attributable income, unidentified copyright usage, unauthorised duplication, price fixing and collection agency cartels.

Sadly, we’re stuck in primitive times. Still, there’s no need to laugh or cry.

¹ Even the word ‘property’ is a misnomer – we don’t ‘own’ copyrights like we own goods. Copyright is a set of privileges (copy, perform, modify, sell etc.) granted by governments.

² We’re only talking copyrights here, not patents – because they’re a minefield of toxic parasites and mixed metaphors.

³ We can but hope.