On Intellectual Property

This post is entirely a response to Molly Wood's excellent Blog, The Culture of Ownership. For those who haven't checked it out yet, you should. Molly's opinions(well, even she'll admit they're rants) on the shenanigans of corporations and even whole nations are often hilarious, and always on point.

With that in mind, I thought it would behoove me to have a statement about how I feel about copyright. Keep in mind that while in the past I have made a portion of my income from Intellectual Property (articles for magazines mostly), I have never depended on it for my entire livelihood, so take what I have to say with a grain of salt.

And so, the statement: While intellectual property law at one time served a useful purpose (that is, protecting the ability of artists, writers, musicians, inventors, etc to create work and protect it from misuse) it has been warped to provide protection to the massive corporate infrastructure. Furthermore, the invention of the internet and the technology surrounding that has made most Intellectual Property law as it is currently written useless.

So why do we hold on to it. Mostly it has to do with comparative advantage, at least in the USA. The US has a huge comparative advantage when it comes to intellectual property. In fact, intellectual property makes up a huge portion of our GDP. When a congressman starts looking at the figures, he or she rapidly realizes that they need to protect Intellectual Property at all costs.

Trent Reznor's experiment with "Ghosts I-IV" should be a heads up to everyone(that means you RIAA), though, that intellectual property can still make huge amounts of money without the antiquated copyright system (Reznor released all four volumes under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike License rather than a traditional copyright). Granted, it's not like Reznor was an unknown artist. His previous label had pumped a lot of money into promoting him and so this is not exactly a model for new artists. However, it could be. The day is rapidly approaching when sites like Myspace, Hi5, and Youtube could push relatively unknown artists to stardom. Even better would be sites that are devoted to music, mixing together previously unknown artists with well known artists they are similar to. (Are you listening Last.FM and Pandora?) Such sites could even sell these artists songs using a Micropayment system.

And as to enforcing copyright: It's become impossible. Every measure taken to prevent it has been easily bypassed. Encrypt the media, and someone figures out how to decrypt it. Put DRM on downloaded music, and the receiver simply burns it to CD and rerips it in Non-DRMed MP3 or OGG format. When all else fails, they can convert to analog and copy the analog signal.

The latest talk about fighting copyright infringement is packet shaping and metering bandwidth. Traffic shaping is easily beaten by encrypting peer to peer traffic. If an ISP can't read the packet, they can't tell that it contains intellectual property. And all bandwidth metering does is prevent small time crooks from downloading illegal content. Sure, it'll stop junior from downloading from bit torrent once his parents get the first metered internet bill, but it certainly won't prevent people who make a living from distributing illegal copies from downloading. They have the money to afford it, and now you've given them more open bandwidth to do it with, since most other peer to peer traffic will be gone.