Copyrights

Copyrights are a big and very controversial issue these days, especially as both copyrights, and technologies that facilitate free copying/sharing of commercial products, are widely abused nowadays.

Original purpose of copyrights, and their abuse

Copyrights were originally set up to encourage production and innovation by helping to ensure that content creators are rewarded for their work, thus giving them an incentive to continue producing.

However, there is a long-established trend towards powerful companies using copyrights as a way of stifling competition and attempting to maximise short-term profit margins, by charging money for uses of copyrighted products that were previously free, and reclassifying such free uses as "piracy", notable examples including making backups for personal use and the second-hand products market.  This is enforced using copy protection, where a convenient clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act forbids the circumvention of copy protection and thus always puts copyright holders, legally, in the right in these situations.  It may be immoral but many people are fond of dismissing moral-based perspectives with, "The law is the law."

This problem is fuelled by one of the key flaws in the modern-day version of free market capitalism: companies are typically required to deliver maximum profits to their shareholders over short time spans, resulting in "minimum service for maximum profit", instead of striving to offer a good service for customers, sacrificing short-term profits but most likely gaining profits in the long-term due to the larger loyal fan base.  It is no accident that among copy protection methods, Valve Software's Steam and Mojang's authemtication method for Minecraft on the PC are relatively popular with customers these days- Valve and Mojang are independent companies and so have more scope to compromise on short-term profits for the sake of improving the overall customer experience, and gaining more profits in the long-term.

Free sharing of copyrighted works

Free sharing gives consumers significant short-term benefits as it means that they get more for what they buy, and it can also stimulate people into buying more products due to the extra brand awareness and exposure that it generates.  Some people, of the sort who feel a duty to support their favourite content creators by buying their products, buy more, not less, as a result of indulging in copying and file-sharing, thus producing a win-win situation where they get more products, and content creators get more of their money.  Many are keen to downplay these benefits because they do not want to be seen as condoning/supporting illegal activities, but this leads to considerable bias when considering what forms of copying should and shouldn't be prohibited (we end up with circular reasoning along the lines, "X is illegal, therefore it's bad, and therefore it should be illegal").

However, free sharing, especially when it becomes excessive, presents a risk of the free rider problem developing, where people develop a mentality of, "Why buy anything when I can get it for free?".  When "free riding" becomes widespread, it erodes content creators' revenues and thus the incentive for them to continue producing, which negates the benefits to consumers of the free sharing.

Some forms of copyright infringement have much larger cons.  There are certain circumstances where the increased product/brand exposure and awareness can have a harmful effect, such as when unfinished or confidential products are leaked to the general public.  Copying for profit is usually harmful, where counterfeit goods are sold and money goes to the illicit sellers rather than the content creators, for people are far less likely to buy a product if they have already paid money for it to an illicit seller, than if they got it for free.

The "copying is theft" propaganda

There is a positive intention behind this- a lot of people don't realise that if they become "free riders", they effectively deprive content creators of money, just as they would do if they stole products from a shop, and so the "copying is theft" analogy helps to get that point across.

However, the "copying is theft" propaganda is often used as a "straw man" argument to try and push for tighter copyright restrictions, such as in the following exchange:

A.  I believe that infringing activity X probably doesn't erode sales and benefits customers, so an associated aspect of copyright laws probably needs to be relaxed.
B.  X is copyright infringement.  Copyright infringement is stealing.  Therefore X is stealing.  Stealing is always wrong.  Therefore X is always wrong.  Therefore X should be illegal.
C.  I believe that the second-hand products market should not be stifled.
B.  Second-hand products are like copyright infringement (since revenues go to the second-hand seller and not to the content creator).  Copyright infringement is stealing.  Therefore buying second-hand products is like stealing them from a shop.  Therefore the second-hand market must go.

As I have hopefully established, the real problems with free sharing of copyrighted products are somewhat different to those with, say, stealing them from a shop.  That doesn't meant that free sharing of copyrighted products is OK- sometimes it is beneficial to both consumers and content creators, but there are other cases where it can be more damaging to content creators than if the products were physically stolen.

As I touched upon earlier, many people refer to copyright infringement as "piracy".  I think the analogy with piracy out at sea works quite well regarding the organised, underground "for profit" forms of copying and unauthorised distribution of goods (which is the sort of thing that originally got called "piracy", dating back from well before the 20th century), but is rather excessive when applied to, say, someone copying a CD for a friend or playing two-player multiplayer using one copy of a PC game.

What to do about illegal file-sharing and copying?

Most authorities have traditionally taken the line of clamping down against "casual copying", such as people making copies of CDs for friends, or downloading copyrighted media from "above ground" websites, which has generally had the effect of driving the free sharing of copyrighted products underground.

Their argument is that, while it might make the underground problem worse, at least it stops a large percentage of the copyright infringement.  The problem is, while this method may address a large percentage of the legal problem, it probably doesn't help the moral problem.  Most of the people who indulge in "casual copying" probably do not buy significantly fewer products as a result of it, while some of the underground stuff that goes on, such as internet companies profiting from downloads of copyrighted material, and organised "pirate firms", almost certainly causes significant erosion of content creators' revenues.  And, as far as content creators who are struggling to find incentives to continue producing are concerned, it is the moral problem that matters- their revenues don't depend on what the law does and doesn't say, but rather on how many people are keen to support them by repeatedly buying their products.

The above makes me feel that perhaps we should be looking into ways of making the "free sharing" issue primarily legal and regulated, rather than illegal and underground, and educating consumers about the "free rider problem" (rather than spoon-feeding them with "copying is stealing" propaganda), and providing consumers with incentives to buy products.  Copy protection often detracts from this, because typically, official products force consumers to jump through hoops associated with the protection, while illicit versions tend to be stripped of the protection.  However, companies that offer online facilities associated with their products can adopt a policy of releasing products without any copy protection but requiring an online account to be created in order to purchase it via download and/or access online extras, so that it is easy for paying customers, and hard for non-paying customers, to get the online extras.  This is the line that Mojang has taken with the PC game Minecraft, for example.  Valve Software's Steam typically requires one-time online authentication upon installing a product, which is open to abuse, but its other features offer another strong example of how successful the "offering online extras to paying customers" approach can be.  Another option, most useful for products that don't have a significant online component, is  to bundle hard-to-copy extras with boxed copies of products.

Another issue, which I believe may detract more significantly from content creators' revenues than copyright infringement, is the way that publishers and distributors typically get a much larger slice of the "pie" than they do, a balance that needs to be tweaked in order to ensure that the creators get a large percentage of the money.  Some would be more inclined to buy products, rather than getting them freely off someone else, if they felt that most of their money was going to their favourite artists and not to whoever was publishing and distributing the work.  Digital distribution is helping this situation to a significant extent, as there are no issues with shipping and distribution costs, but the problem in the traditional retail sector needs to be addressed.