The End of Copyright ?

Now that’s an interesting article by Ernest Adams about the End of Copyright. Starting with Gutenberg he gives a rough introduction how copyright came into existence. The interesting part begins after this introduction. When the first photocopiers were introduced people started using them to copy parts of books for their own personal use. This was at first frowned at but later a fair-use law was introduced due to the massive amount of people who used the photocopiers.

“When enough people feel that it’s OK to do a thing, that thing ceases to be wrong in their own cultural context. You can complain about moral relativism all you like, but the facts are inescapable”

That’s pretty self-explanatory, if enough people are doing something it will become common use and therefor legal. You can´t put millions of people into jail because of something like this. Therefor the law has to change to reflect this.

He uses this premise to analyse the current situation of file trading and comes to the conclusion that the lawsuits, the spyware and the DMCA are the death struggles of an outdated business model.

The last part of his essay looks at the possible future, at different models that could be used if there would be no copyright. If you are interested head over to Gamasutra and take a look for yourself.

Update: Five years later and the situation has not changed at all. The content industry is still struggling to keep up with the ever changing Internet, and still insisting on blocking, prosecuting and suing users left and right. It is not really clear if and how this will end. Their latest efforts in the United States, SOPA and PIPA, have been pulled for now, but there is some certainty that these proposals will come back in the near future in a slightly different form.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Tuesday November 29, 2005 -
Tags:copyright, Music Industry