olivetalks

It’s very common to say that copyright is necessary to guarantee protection of the rights of authors and content producers. It’s supposed to encourage people to be creative.

It seems the truth is different. In his article The Promise of a Post-Copyright World Karl Fogel argues for a different view of copyright. In the beginnings, in sixteenth-century England, the copyright was a form of private-sector censorship of printed materials. Far too many works were being produced and the new technology made it difficult for the government to control the distribution of the printed materials, some of them of rebellious nature. The solution which was chosen was a legal monopoly on printing and distribution in exchange for monitoring the content of the publications. That’s how the copyright was born. It wasn’t about rights of authors but about censorship.

Later on the publishers managed to convince the English Parliament to create the idea of intellectual property. In theory the intellectual property originated with the authors but the publishers new very well that no author would be able to widely distribute their works without access to printing press. To have access to distribution the authors would have to transfer the copyright to the publishers. This way the distributors managed to stop being seen as censors. Nonetheless the creation of copyright was based on business interests of publishers and censorship needs of the government.

Similar laws were introduced in other countries and the copyright terms have been steadily extended ever since.

Hundreds of years later we’ve invented the Internet and very quickly it started eroding the copyright. The basic reason is that with the Internet the distribution costs for most works became negligible and the copyright stopped making sense for the society at large. And we can already see that people keep creating even when they explicitly allow free unlimited copying of their works. In the future we’ll see even more of that.

More interesting articles about copyright can be found at http://questioncopyright.org/.