After an email between Justin Kownacki and Eric Williams about this copyright article - decided to just write a blog response.
To delve into the copyright debate, we have to define the proper metric that we're trying to maximize. I (and the US constitution) define intellectual property as a system meant to incentivize the creation of novel content and inventions for the benefit of society at large. This means that society comes before profit. Profit is the means to an end - not the end itself.
Concentrating on content creation, there are two very general measures of societal benefits: quantity of works released and quality of the works themselves - quality being measured in their ability to benefit society. There's no easy way to determine the latter, so I'll suffice it to say that such a measure would rate a publication like Science (one of the most prestigious journals in science) as higher than the far more profitable and widely distributed publication of People Magazine. Pure profit or circulation figures are poorly (and often negatively) correlated with beneficial societal impact.
According to the O'Reilly Radar Blog, 93% of ISBNs sold less than 1000 copies and represent only 13% of profit. Many would argue that this shows that the Long Tail concept doesn't work to sustain publishing, however I would argue that it actually demonstrates that, even with intellectual property, most authors aren't making money off their books. This means these books will still be published and available to benefit society sans copyright. This means that the real motive for most books is for something else other than profit - or at least not for one's livelihood.
Another interesting fact pointed out by the article is that there are 32M uniques books (some have suggested the number is over 100M) and only 4% are in print (~1.2M). Further, Google has about 500K books available in eBook form, and Amazon has 250K available (with some overlap I'm sure). If we were able to digitize all 32M, without intellectual property, we'd have a massive amount of content which would certainly benefit society. One of the biggest travesties is that academic journals (supposedly public) are actually gated off behind pay-walls to only benefit the few willing to pay tens to thousands for access - not the community at large.
Looking to other media, the news being a great example, I think there is a more valid concern for the copyrighters. Few would argue that the news isn't required for a healthy democracy, but the battle is really over what that media should be and how it should best serve that end. Again, I'd like to define metrics. The most important attributes of journalist media are: accuracy of content, depth/breadth of content, diversity of views represented, and analysis.
A publication like the NYT is most likely more accurate the the run of the mill blog, but certainly compared to a reader with 30 high quality feeds, there will be no contest that the latter will have a higher accuracy, depth/breadth, diversity, and analysis than will the NYT. Try to have a better startup section than TechCrunch or best Ars Technica for in-depth technology analysis. Instead of treating a single blog as a replacement for the NYT - compare the periodicals section at B&N to every blog listed by Technorati. The only real issue is a filter, and with Twitter, gReader, and a host of other services that'll nearly eliminated as well.
Why do these bloggers do it? Some have developed great ways of making money directly from their blog like Ars Technica's brilliant model of access to their expert writing staff. Most money is made indirectly however. Every industry I can think of has a blog that rises to the surface to serve their industry. In mine, a few great digital fabrication blogs give me awesome coverage of the latest information - faster than the trade journals. These guys do it because it gives them prominence - which later gets them money. Throughout history, most writing was done to exchange ideas - not to directly make money.
This brings me to the bread and butter of writing as a profession, not books and publications, those are rare jobs; I'm talking about making marketing materials, commercials, manuals, etc. The issue with these is that pirating really isn't much of an issue. It's not like other car companies are going to copy the manual for a Taurus for their Malibou, and U-Haul's commercials are never going to stolen by Ryder. Copyright doesn't protect these content creators - contract law, relationships and PR do. This isn't about "getting published" it's more of a consulting relationship. I don't want to switch creative firms because they created our brand, and it's very difficult for others to take over where they left off.
In the end, copyright results in less creativity because it restricts the information available to make new content - a massive opportunity cost. The "damage" mainly done is to profits and controls, but society would greatly benefit as whole. I would call content creators who want monopolies on "their" ideas to be the real greedy ones. It's like Jonas Salk wanting to keep the method of polio vaccination to himself so he can profit early on from rich families (oh wait, big pharma already does this!).
What do you think?
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