Copyright Talk

A small editorial in the Vancouver (Canada) Sun purports to argue for the death of copyright. Buried in the latter half of the article is this statement, “Copyright was originally created as a means for government to exercise censorship after the advent of the movable type printing press.”

I’ve never heard this before. If anyone out there has some idea of the source or history behind this statement, I would greatly appreciate it if you would pass it on to me.

But that aside, the author of this article argues that copyright is not necessary for authors to be able to get paid for their creative work. He argues that most authors don’t make a meaningful income through copyright anyway, that they make most of their money in other ways, like sponsorships.

First, he’s right that most copyright owners don’t make much - or any - money from copyright licensing itself. That’s because most either don’t try, or don’t try successfully. There’s no evidence that copyright actually prevents them from making money. Some don’t make money simply because they are not very good!

The internet, far from being the inevitable death knell for copyright, is actually the tool that at last allows the potential for a good and useful distribution system for individual creators, who are no longer dependent on being picked up by a good publisher in order to get their works out in front of the public. The internet provides the means to diversify the creative offerings available to the public, whether they are offered commercially or non-commercially.

But it is that same scale that helps individual creators, that also hurts individuals who merely make collages of the work of others. Cute videos backed by popular music, clever retellings of best-selling books or movies, can still be made by individuals, and if they continued to show them in their home to their circle of friends then we wouldn’t be hearing cries for the revision or death of copyright. But because amateurs now have access to the same theater and audience as the pros, but the amateurs do not feel obligated to play by the same rules of permission and copyright, we have a clash of intent.

copyright, derivative works, internet