Monday, July 20, 2009
Blog of Ages Redux
I worked for a number of years in old media: books, magazines, and film. They all depended, and to some extent still do depend, on the concept of intellectual property. Simply put, it means that the person who creates a piece of writing or music or a work of art owns it just as much as the person who grows a tomato owns it. If the tomato grower works for a farmer, of course, the tomato might belong to the farmer, just as the articles written by a staff writer for a magazine might well belong to the magazine.
But what happens when the tomato is put on the Internet? First, it becomes an infinity of tomatoes. The power of intellectual property lies in two aspects of the work—the tomato. The second aspect is in what we call, appropriately enough, secondary or subsidiary rights. Your Star Wars toys and Living Words lunch boxes fall into this area. They exploit the idea of the tomato, and I've heard no one dispute that the creator of the tomato should control that idea.
The first right of the intellectual creator, though, is copyright, which is exactly what it appears to be—the right to make (or allow others to make) copies. This is a relatively recent idea. Only a little more than two hundred years ago, an author or composer would sell a work to a publisher for a flat fee. If it was hugely successful, the composer might have some additional leverage in negotiating the next sale, but would never see another pfennig on that work. Other publishers would be likely to put out their own editions, for which the creator would get nothing.
Copyright allowed creators to lease, rather than sell, the rights to their work. An author's contract now is for an advance against royalties, and if the book continues to sell, an author can keep getting checks for a lifetime (and beyond; current copyright law in the U.S. protects the rights for 75 years after the author's death). The publisher is compensated, of course, for the costs of editing and designing and manufacturing and distributing the book; all that comes out of the price you and I pay for a physical book.
But what happens when there is no physical book? If I buy an e-book or an audio book download, no physical object is transferred to me. The farmer sells me the tomato, but he can still sell you the very same tomato.
There are some people who believe that the low manufacturing cost (for a book, basically editing and design, both of which can really be omitted if you aren't obsessed with quality) should be reflected in the price. That is, they think that we should give away the right to copy intellectual property and control only who can sell it and the secondary rights. Some authors (the most famous is probably Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer) now release their works for free on the Internet, assuming that readers will then be inspired to purchase physical copies--and Doctorow's books do have respectable sales ranks at Amazon, so people are buying them.
The other side of that is that many people believe that everything should be free if it is freely available on the Web, or if it can be made freely available. Writers' organizations spend a fair amount of time tracking down pirate sites that post scanned copies of books whose authors have not agreed to release their texts (Doctorow and others release some rights under Creative Commons licenses, which you can look up at creativecommons.org). The pirates, both those who scan and post and those who unknowingly download those texts, often claim that they have done nothing wrong, since “information wants to be free.” Well, it may want to be free; I want to be rich, but my writing is not making that happen—in part because I face competition from those who are willing to give their work away for free. If my work is better than theirs, they still have the advantage of price.
I have not really decided on the rights and wrongs of all this, but I keep thinking about Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. With complete freedom of information, will bad information drive out good? It's one more problem to worry about.
But what happens when the tomato is put on the Internet? First, it becomes an infinity of tomatoes. The power of intellectual property lies in two aspects of the work—the tomato. The second aspect is in what we call, appropriately enough, secondary or subsidiary rights. Your Star Wars toys and Living Words lunch boxes fall into this area. They exploit the idea of the tomato, and I've heard no one dispute that the creator of the tomato should control that idea.
The first right of the intellectual creator, though, is copyright, which is exactly what it appears to be—the right to make (or allow others to make) copies. This is a relatively recent idea. Only a little more than two hundred years ago, an author or composer would sell a work to a publisher for a flat fee. If it was hugely successful, the composer might have some additional leverage in negotiating the next sale, but would never see another pfennig on that work. Other publishers would be likely to put out their own editions, for which the creator would get nothing.
Copyright allowed creators to lease, rather than sell, the rights to their work. An author's contract now is for an advance against royalties, and if the book continues to sell, an author can keep getting checks for a lifetime (and beyond; current copyright law in the U.S. protects the rights for 75 years after the author's death). The publisher is compensated, of course, for the costs of editing and designing and manufacturing and distributing the book; all that comes out of the price you and I pay for a physical book.
But what happens when there is no physical book? If I buy an e-book or an audio book download, no physical object is transferred to me. The farmer sells me the tomato, but he can still sell you the very same tomato.
There are some people who believe that the low manufacturing cost (for a book, basically editing and design, both of which can really be omitted if you aren't obsessed with quality) should be reflected in the price. That is, they think that we should give away the right to copy intellectual property and control only who can sell it and the secondary rights. Some authors (the most famous is probably Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer) now release their works for free on the Internet, assuming that readers will then be inspired to purchase physical copies--and Doctorow's books do have respectable sales ranks at Amazon, so people are buying them.
The other side of that is that many people believe that everything should be free if it is freely available on the Web, or if it can be made freely available. Writers' organizations spend a fair amount of time tracking down pirate sites that post scanned copies of books whose authors have not agreed to release their texts (Doctorow and others release some rights under Creative Commons licenses, which you can look up at creativecommons.org). The pirates, both those who scan and post and those who unknowingly download those texts, often claim that they have done nothing wrong, since “information wants to be free.” Well, it may want to be free; I want to be rich, but my writing is not making that happen—in part because I face competition from those who are willing to give their work away for free. If my work is better than theirs, they still have the advantage of price.
I have not really decided on the rights and wrongs of all this, but I keep thinking about Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. With complete freedom of information, will bad information drive out good? It's one more problem to worry about.
