[NCUC-DISCUSS] The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World

[Alex Gakuru]

....excerpts....

....

The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting
the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors'
rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent
arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if
anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English
government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few.
The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available
for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood
of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative
function then as building roads.

The method the government chose was to establish a guild of private-sector
censors, the London Company of Stationers, whose profits would depend on
how well they performed their function. The Stationers were granted a royal
monopoly over all printing in England, old works as well as new, in return
for keeping a strict eye on what was printed. Their charter gave them not
only exclusive right to print, but also the right to search out and
confiscate unauthorized presses and books, and even to burn illegally
printed books. No book could be printed until it was entered in the
company's Register, and no work could be added to the Register until it had
passed the crown's censor, or had been self-censored by the Stationers. The
Company of Stationers became, in effect, the government's private,
for-profit information police force.
.....

The arrival of the Internet fundamentally changed this equation. It has
become cliché to say that the Internet is as revolutionary a development as
the printing press, and it is. But it is revolutionary in a different way.
The printing press may have made it possible to turn one book into a
thousand books, but those books still had to travel from the press into the
hands of readers. Physical books were not only the medium in which the
content was consumed, they were also the medium in which it was transported
to the consumer. Thus, a publisher's total expense was proportional to the
number of copies distributed. In such a situation, it is reasonable to ask
that each user bear a portion of the costs of distribution. Each user is,
after all, more or less responsible for her particular quantum of expense.
If the book (or record) is in her hands, it must have gotten there somehow,
which in turn means someone spent money to get it there. Divide those
expenses by the number of copies, add in some amount for profit, and you
arrive, roughly speaking, at the book's price.

But today, the medium over which content is distributed can be unrelated to
the medium in which it is ultimately consumed. The data can be sent over a
wire, at essentially no cost, and the user can print up a copy at her own
expense, and at whatever quality she can afford, on the other end
[7]<http://questioncopyright.org/promise#7>.
Furthermore, it is no longer important to possess the master; in fact, the
concept of the master copy itself is obsolete. To make a perfect copy of a
printed work is actually quite hard, although making a corrupt or abridged
copy is very easy. Meanwhile, to make a perfect copy of a digital work is
trivially easy — it's making an *imperfect* copy that requires extra effort.

....
http://questioncopyright.org/promise
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