My views on copyright
This text is outdated. I'm keeping it up because I haven't gotten around making a more up-to-date English version about my current views on copyright. If you can read Finnish, you can find an extensive discussion of my current views in my book Jokapiraatinoikeus (free PDF version).
Since my last posting on the subject of piracy got me into a couple of debates, I thought it might be good to clarify my views on copyright a bit.
Putting it simply, I do not believe that an artist has an automatic right to profit from all art they've done. However, they do have what I'd call a "manual" right to profit. This is probably best illustrated with an example. Let's say I own something (anything). For instance, I own several shirts. I do not have an automatic right to profit from them - I don't get money simply for owning them. However, I do have a "manual" right to profit from them - if I put them up for sale, and can convince somebody to buy them, then I do have the right to any money that the other person is willing to pay for them.
Of course, copyright usually applies to things that don't leave your possession after you've sold them. Effectively you aren't selling the object itself, but copies of it. Here we can use an analogy of a factory that can produce a lot of copies of the same product. I, as the factory owner, can sell lots of copies of the good in question, as long as I can persuade somebody to buy them. After somebody has bought my product, nothing prevents them from taking it apart, studying it, and making their own copies for a price that is cheaper. If somebody does that, and I insist on selling my own products for a price that is more expensive, then I have no room to complain if people don't buy them. I'm not entitled for a compensation for just making the goods - nobody forced me to make them. But I do have a right to get payment for them, if people agree to buy them from me.
It is likewise with things that are usually covered by copyright. If an artist produces a work of art, and somebody copies it without paying, then the artist is not "hurt" or having "his rights violated". The artist's right to sell his products to those willing to pay is not being denied - he might find fewer people who are willing to buy his product, but it's still possible for him to find them. We can see that artists don't have an automatic right to profit from their work from the simple fact that there are many artists who aren't getting their work sold. Many more people submit their manuscripts to publishers than get published - this we see as natural, for the publishers only want to sell the very best (by this, I mean things that can in turn be sold onwards, for the pedants who don't think the stuff that sells is actually good). If artists had the right to automatically profit from their work, then anyone who created something that could be called art should be rewarded for it. But they do not - they have a right to profit if they can get it sold, not a right to profit simply for creating it.
While piracy does reduce the amount of people an artist can sell his goods to, that by itself isn't enough for us to condemn piracy - for instance, the state could create a law saying that everybody had to use at least twenty dollars a month to buying art. (That's effectively what tax-funded artist stipends are.) If the amount is low enough, we might not protest, but if it gets sufficiently large, we'll start objecting. It is a fact that forcing us to buy a lot of art would increase the amount of money that artists got, and repealing the law would reduce the amount of people that artists could sell their goods to. Yet this fact isn't, by itself, enough to make us uphold the law. While the artists would benefit, without the law the money that went to the artists would go to other people, and with the law those people would suffer. We must look at the whole picture, and decide how much we want to favor the artists and how much we want to favor the others.
Now, what should be obvious - but unfortunately isn't, thanks to the extensive pro-copyright propaganda that people have been subjected to - is that copyright has nothing to do with an artist's right to profit by selling their good. Copyright is giving the artist (or the company representing him) a complete monopoly on the product, saying that he should get a cut from everything related to the product. It's as if I was an owner of a factory that made shoes, and not only was I entitled to a cut each time somebody resold the shoes they had bought from me, but nobody else was allowed to make shoes, either. (In the example, I have a monopoly on shoes - in the case of the artist, the monopoly is on the work of art they created.) Monopolies such as this do exist, and during the age of mercantilism they were even more popular, with the state granting select companies the exclusive right to produce certain products. However, over time it was realized that free competition was a more effective approach, and most of the monopolies were removed. Modern-day shoemakers don't have a monopoly on selling shoes, and nobody says that shoe-makers are being denied their right to profit because they don't have a monopoly. So, an artist certainly has a right to profit from their creation, but that does not imply that they need to be given a monopoly on it.
Here the obvious question is, if artists don't get a cut on all sales of their product, how are they supposed to get enough profit off their work to live? Well, the obvious answer is that most artists don't get enough money from their art to live on in the first place, even with copyright laws. It's not like the artists were forced to spend every moment of their life creating art, with nothing else that they could do. It would certainly be preferrable if people could earn their living doing something that they loved doing - but then, lots of people have hobbies that they would love to be paid for. One of my hobbies is role-playing - I'd certainly love it if I'd be paid for game mastering, and could earn a living doing that. But I game master even though I don't earn a cent out of it, and don't consider it an injustice that I'm not paid. (I purposefully chose game mastering, and not being a player, as my example - even though role-playing is an immensly co-operative activity, it could be argued that the GM, more than vice versa, provides a service to the players. Thus, the other players are benefiting from my work without paying for it!) Especially with the advent of the Internet, there are plenty of people creating art and other products without getting a cent in return - just look at the whole open-source movement and all the free mods produced for different games, and sites such as fanfiction.net that host tens of thousands of stories written with no expectation of getting money.
I might, at this point, be accused of being a hypocrite. After all, I have had one book published, and am currently in the process of writing another, and I've gotten money for it. I don't dispute that getting the money is a nice bonus, and that it motivates me to write things I might not otherwise write. It's still not enough to make a living on, though, nor is it the primary reason for why I write. The primary reason is the sense of accomplishment at having one's writings widely read and seeing them published as a book. Therefore we can see that while it's not necessary for us to guarantee every artist a chance to live off their work (after all, we don't do that today), it might be desirable to provide artists an extra incentive to create, for this might make them more productive. Copyright is one way of providing that extra incentive, but it is one that on the whole, ends up harming society and the art more than it benefits them. After all, as the art costs more, fewer people get a chance to enjoy it. There are other ways of creating incentives. Here's one historical example, taken from the book Against Intellectual Monopoly:
Start with English authors selling books in the United States in the nineteenth century. “During the nineteenth century anyone was free in the United States to reprint a foreign publication” without making any payment to the author, besides purchasing a legally sold copy of the book. This was a fact that greatly upset Charles Dickens whose works, along with those of many other English authors, were widely distributed in the U.S., and yet American publishers found it profitable to make arrangements with English authors. Evidence before the 1876-8 Commission shows that English authors sometimes received more from the sale of their books by American publishers, where they had no copyright, than from their royalties in [England] where they did have copyright. In short without copyright, authors still get paid, sometime more than with it.
How did it work? Then, as now, there is a great deal of both impatience in the demand for books, especially good books. English authors would sell American publishers the manuscripts of their new books before their publication in Britain. The American publisher who bought the manuscript had every incentive to saturate the market for that particular novel as soon as possible, to avoid cheap imitators to come in soon after. This led to mass publication at fairly low prices. The amount of revenues British authors received up front from American publishers often exceeded the amount they were able to collect over a number of years from royalties in the UK. Notice that, at the time, the US market was comparable in size to the UK market.
More broadly, the lack of copyright protection, which permitted the United States publishers’ “pirating” of English writers, was a good economic policy of great social value for the people of United States, and of no detriment, as the Commission report and other evidence confirm, for English authors. Not only did it enable the establishment and rapid growth of a large and successful publishing business in the United States; also, and more importantly, it increased literacy and benefited the cultural development of the American people by flooding the market with cheap copies of great books. As an example: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol sold for six cents in the US, while it was priced at roughly two dollars and fifty cents in England. This dramatic increase in literacy was probably instrumental for the emergence of a great number of United States writers and scientists toward the end of the nineteenth century.
I like this example because it both demonstrates that artists can profit even without copyright (by persuading somebody to pay them for their work), and because it shows the detrimental effect that enforcing copyright has on society. Of course, the example in question doesn't fully translate to the modern day - today, a person with a scanner and optical character recognition software can take a book they bought and put it up online in a matter of hours if not minutes, so it's impossible for the publisher to flood the market so fast that impatient people aren't better off buying their product. In fact, the piece of art probably gets leaked online even before it's published.
But there are ways for creators to get paid that work even in the modern day. The simplest way are "gratitude sales" - simply put up the product up for download for free, and offer an optional chance for the downloader to pay an amount of money that they choose. The band Radiohead recently did just this, with the result that nearly 40% of the downloaders did actually pay (link). The average price paid for a download (for those 40% who did pay) was six dollars. With 1.2 million people downloading the album, that's an overall profit of nearly three million dollars (2.88 million dollars, to be more exact).
Another method of getting paid is the ransom model. Under the ransom model, an artist announces that she has created, or is working on, a piece of art, but is holding it for ransom. The artist picks a certain amount of money and tells people how they can donate. If enough people donate so that the ransom amount is met, then the artwork is released for everybody to enjoy for free. In 2005, the game designer Greg Stolze announced that he was releasing his game Meatbot Massacre under the ransom model, with a ransom of $600. The amount was met five months before the deadline.
The ransom model is best for established artists, who people can trust to release a high-quality work. It can be critiqued on the grounds that it doesn't work for new artists, who have no previous merits - but then, artists will always benefit the most when they are famous, copyright or no copyright. For those who are talented but need the advertising, I don't think that publishing houses will vanish entirely. There is a lot of stuff online, but often there's so much of it that people want some way to weed out the chaff. Bookstores and music stores still serve the function of showcasing a lot of work that you know somebody has selected to be published, from thousands of competing alternatives. It's all there, (relatively) high-quality work, up for your perusal. It's only required that the publishers adapt and radically bring down the prices of the products they sell, so that the time and effort you save from going to the store isn't counteracted by the fact that you could simply download it all for free. Also, book and music stores don't need to be physical ones - copyright is typically enforced pretty lazily on pornography, and yet there are countless of paid porn sites that live by the subscription model. Pay a certain amount of money each month, and you get free access to all the material inside. The Russian site AllOfMP3 sold music from a wide variety of artists for $0.03 per megabyte of downloaded music, and turned up a $30 million revenue in 2006. Including extensive profiling and recommendation services, such as the ones employed at Amazon and Last.fm, will help sellers provide an extra service to people using them, thus helping artists get more popular.
Listing all the different ways that artists could use to generate a profit without copyright laws would probably take a year. In addition to generic ones, there are also methods that apply specifically to certain art forms - for instance, musicians already get most of their money from live performances, TV shows and movies could be partially funded by product placement and selling of advertisements, and so on.
In short, there is nothing wrong with piracy, and we could do just as fine without copyright as with it - in fact, we might even do better, as culture would spread more. In the very least, we should cut its duration - for instance, to 20 years, and legalize file sharing.
This work is copyright Kaj Sotala and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.