Copyright is dead, producers of intellectual property will have to forget about making killings, Esther Dyson told Forbes magazine. An author will give away his book on the Internet, then make money on the lecture. Disney will give away its movies and make its money selling the toys that go with its movies. It will leave Hollywood vastly smaller than it is today. All those that have made comfortable livings out of the creation of intellectual property will be tempted to dismiss the forecasts out of hand, but they only have to consider the way Netscape Communications Corp and Microsoft Corp are competing to give more and more software away on the Internet, and Sun Microsystems Inc is still agonizing ever more desperately over how it is to make any money out of Java to realize they have to think again. Virtual record collection Microsoft and Netscape hope that by giving the client software away, they will thereby make money out the servers manipulated by the free software to begin to feel decidedly uncomfortable – after all, Polaroid Corp may have made all its money on its proprietary film packs, but it never resorted to giving its cameras away, and even Nintendo Co Ltd, in its desperate efforts to claw back all the ground it has lost to Sony Corp and Sega Enterprises Ltd, shows no sign of being prepared to give the Nintendo 64 away, even if whatever money it earns will be made on the games software for the machines. Is it sensible for Microsoft and Netscape to seed people’s minds with the idea that software is worth so little that it can be given away? There is no future in sentimentally clinging on to the vinyl long player or the Compact Disk (few could get sentimental about the sometimes convenient but otherwise user-hostile Compact Cassette), but even if the entire universe of recorded music were to be made accessible on the Internet, it’s not at all certain that everybody that currently buys albums would be happy to switch to an infinite virtual record collection. Records in whatever tangible form, are after all small objects of desire to many. Nevertheless the anarchy of the Internet means that it can by no way be confidently ruled out that a spontaneous worldwide movement will spring up and make so much copyright recorded music available to download for free that the record companies will simply lose any effective control of their copyrights because as each leak is plugged, 1,000 more will start spurting. Such a development would have a devastating effect on the music business, because very few tours by outfits like REM or Oasis actually make any money: they are undertaken because they are regarded as essential to whipping up interest in the merchandise – overwhelmingly records – that does make money. So will fans have to pay higher prices to see Alanis Morissette or Celine Dion so that the ladies can make a living out of their music.
Law and order
Or is it more likely that the next generation of Canada’s finest simply won’t be able to get a hearing? After all, who is going to put up the money to record them if there is to be no return on the record? These propositions are posed as questions because they have no answers: the Internet is such a democratic – or anarchic – medium that it is up to us. However much music fans may detest the big record companies, aren’t the big record companies, with all their faults, better than no record co mpanies? Cyberspace really is the final frontier, where law and order have yet to be established, and we are currently in the equivalent of the very earliest days of the opening up of the West, or the California gold rush. The practice of flaming makes it clear that concerted vigilantism can work to stamp out a practice widely regarded as anti-social, and those that believed that posting copyright music on the Internet so that it could be downloaded for free was the act of an outlaw could organize a flaming of such sites so that they became inaccessible. Or the record companies could band together to practise direct action, recognizing that the law is so much too slow as to be useless in defending their interests. But can large and ostensibly respectable companies afford to be seen to be taking the law into their own hands and resorting to direct action? Cyberspace is the final frontier: there is no law there. But the trouble is that if the record companies do resort to direct action, or even if it is left to concerned citizens banding together to impose some semblance of law and order, there is unlikely to be on overwhelming majority on the side of copyright protection. Instead, welcome to a re-run of the range wars between the cowboys who needed their beef cattle to roam free, and the farmers that wanted to put up fences and cultivate the range: in many ways, it is surprising that such a shooting war has not already broken out on the Internet. But Esther Dyson’s prediction depends on the Internet becoming the universal medium, consigning all others to the trash can icon of history. And that is far from certain. For those of us who are quite happy to read everything on screen – indeed would rather read a long Wall Street Journal feature on screen than in the newspaper, and who much prefer to have all the notes, press releases or whatever on screen rather than on paper, it is somewhat bemusing to see that the overwhelmingly majority of journalists receiving source material electronically immediately wants to print the stuff out rather than working with it on screen.
Frontier towns
Are such people really going to be content with a book that they have to print out as a stack of paper before they can read it? Even if the book comes free apart from the cost of the connection, the paper and the toner where the hardback alternative costs $25? And what proportion of the world’s literature is likely to be made available for free in cyberspace any time soon? We can certainly see thousands of people that cannot otherwise get into print publishing their work to the Internet, ditto people that cannot get a record company interested in their music. But it is a fairly substantial undertaking to key an entire book to disk. Even doing it with a scanner from the written page is a significant effort. How many people are going to want to do that work unpaid? And if it is copyright material, should we, the collective masters of cyberspace, connive at people doing it? Or are we going to have to start thinking about electing some sheriffs to impose a rough-and-ready form of law and order onto the frontier towns springing up all over cyberspace?
