I meant to write a blog post about last week’s article by Ginsburg. I thought she brought up a good point that we (or at least I) have overlooked so far. She writes “I have a theory about how copyright got a bad name for itself, and I can summarize it in one word: Greed.” Greed takes two forms: the corporation’s attempt to protect its economic monolopy through copyright and the consumers “increase rapacity in acquiring and ‘sharing’ unauthorized copies of music, and more recently motion pictures.” She talkes about how the notion of sharing has changed over time.
Enter DRM to combat our greed. Encrypt our digital information to prevent file sharing. Save the publishers and the media industry because they can’t save themselves. Doctorow takes an extreme approach. He writes, “if your business model can’t survive the emergence of [new technology], it’s time to get another business-model or go broke.”
I am all for the free market system and I tend to want to side with Doctorow (and for the most part I do), but what we are witnessing here (and by here I mean diminishing CD sales, a decline in TV ratings as more and more viewers switch to Hulu type services, and Hollywood films being converted to a bunch of bit torrents), I think, is something too important to allow be washed away by copyright infringement. I’ve had the opprotunity to witness the creative side first had, as I’m sure many of you have too. My uncle is a composer who is now contemplating signing over the rest of his copyrights to his publisher because he’s just not receiving the economic security of sales anymore. He’s actually very concerned about his artistic and economic future. I think there has to be a point where we draw the line and say, okay let’s set our greed aside, we need to start paying for these services again.
I guess I am just trying to play devil’s advocate a little. Afterall, as Doctorow notes, no matter what, there are too many Brad Pitt’s out there able to crack the code. Maybe reworking one’s business model is the best way to go afterall.
