COPYRIGHT: A new era...
Coming of age after 300 years
Monday, May 18, 2009
Dominic Mc Gonigal
It all began at the dawn of the Enlightenment with the Statute of Queen Anne. Our forefathers granted “the Author of any Book or Books...the sole Right and Liberty of Printing such Book and Books.”
Over the next three centuries, it was an idea that was adopted throughout the world. But it remained largely hidden from public view, buried in artists’ contracts, distributor agreements and High Court judgements. Copyright infringers were generally rival businesses or illegal operators out to defraud the artists’ business partners.Then, along came the internet. Suddenly it became possible for anyone to take, first, a music track, then a TV programme, then a film and even a whole catalogue. Consumers met copyright and it was not a marriage made in heaven. Rather than ‘yes, we can’, the first experience was ‘no, you can’t’. By the time the legal services were readily available, people had already become used to circumventing the normal rules and getting everything free. All the accepted behaviour of the High Street had been usurped in a no-questions-asked culture online.The digital utopians leapt on this and declared that copyright was dead. They wanted to mix and mash with impunity. They heralded a new age when users would generate their own content. The creator is dead, long live the user.But is copyright dead? Or have the digital utopians only sighted the tip of the iceberg, unaware of the depths of creativity and commerce beneath the surface?In the digital environment, all we have to trade are intangibles. Some of that is raw fact and information. The more interesting material is the smart arrangement of that information and the creations of the heart and the mind.How do you reward an artist, when a work can be accessed almost anywhere by anyone? How do you retain a link between an artist and their work when it can be cached on a billion computers? That’s where the 18thC concept of ownership comes into its own. If you know that the recording you see on your file menu belongs to those who created it, there is an automatic obligation to the artists and producers. You can’t just take someone else’s work, just because it is convenient to you. These principles are well established in the physical world, but we have yet to accommodate them in the virtual environment. It is not the concept of copyright that is dead in the digital age. It is the application of that fundamental principle – that you own what you create – which is yet to be realised. Once we have worked out how to do that, we will have the truly enlightened age envisaged by our forebears.
Dominic McGonigal is director of government relations at Phonographic Performance Ltd. http://dominicseuroblog.wordpress.com/
