With the victorious advent of Internet the issue of Intellectual Property became as topical, as burning and frequently arising as it has never been before. And understandably so - the advancement of technological means provided ample ground for digitalization of copyrighted materials (print, audio, video materials ) and, naturally, unsanctioned sharing of these materials, which, of course, called for the backlash from copyright and stakeholders. The situation resulted in continuous modification of legislation and initialization of, essentially, an ongoing technocratic-bureaucratic war (bureaucrats recruiting some technologically savvy people for their cause and vice-versa, but general breakdown remains as stated). The fact that the strife is so protracted without, seemingly, either side having decisive advantage serves to further prove the complexity and multifaceted-ness of the matter.
My personal evaluation of the matter is extremely biased, as I am a heavy consumer of others IP (both legally and illegally) and haven't produced anything really worth copyrighting - or, for that matter, worth illegally reproducing - yet. Therefore, I do believe the strife to ban internet piracy, for instance, to be quite futile as the means required for successful abolition of illegal distribution of copyrighted content would most probably require infringement of most basic human rights, most specifically, privacy and limiting services which are used to be consumed unlimited (internet traffic in this case), which is never taken lightly by those whose freedom is being tampered with. However, if the extremes mentioned are not to be applied, the ping-pong game of yet another restriction and its clever workaround is to continue. The investment, and thereby resourcefulness, of people fighting for retention of their "freedom", however anarchistic that may be, is greater than that of representatives of those desiring to maximize their income, hence the balance between legitimacy of claims of the latter and simultaneous prosperity of seemingly foul misdeeds. I would also like to mention that monetary loss claims of record companies, software developers and such are oftentimes absurd - only a small fraction of those who illegally obtained the copyrighted product would have actually bought the IP object had it not been available for illegal download and it is highly doubtful that this is taken into account in lawsuits and reports submitted for governmental review (so as to prompt enhancement of legislation).
Truth be told, the copyright issues are not only taxing on those consuming Intellectual Work object, but on those producing them as well. A whole group of renowned [fantasy] authors (George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb) are apparently psyched out to severe criticism and abolition of fan fiction by an instance which had once occurred - a writer, who generally encouraged fanfiction, encountered a situation when her own ideas couldn't be realized as a fan of her work introduced similar plot lines in the fanfiction prior to original writer having finished the book and when approached by the author on that matter, demanded a percentage of author's earnings. The incident is indeed bizarre and fails to conform to common sense.
On the high note, more and more producers of intellectual property realize the overall trend of digitalization and the excess of having intermediaries feeding off of the product of their intellectual work - hence more and more artists turn to selling their art as digital download, track by track - as Steve Jobs said, people are not really all that inclined to stealing and if given an opportunity to purchase a product for a well justified price (a dollar per track, for instance) they're quite likely to do that. Moreover, the instance of Brandon Sanderson (the author entitled to finishing the Wheel of Time epic cycle by Robert Jordant) publishing close to final drafts (as a result of continuous web-publishing of the book in progress) of his novel "Warbreaker" is admirable - the web version, slightly less polished than the one that saw the print, is still available as a free download on Brandon Sanderson's website and reports show that physical book sell numbers were hardly affected by that at all. Sometimes, making the work in progress available to general public is even more beneficial - such practice helped Gluhovski land a contract with the publishing house as his book Metro 2033 quickly gained popularity over the internet. He remained true to his audience and had his second book made available to the audience via his website - that, after the initial print release, chapter a week, but still. So, perhaps, changing the marketing models to more flexible ones and relaxing the restrictions to some degree (as opposed to imposing new ones) is to have a calming effect on the overall conflict? I, personally, really do believe it to be so.
All in all, I believe the strife to protect intellectual property is blown out of proportion and common sense - not that an intellectual work does not deserve to be accordingly rewarded, no - but nowadays the whole mankind is subjected to suffering on the account of those, holding the rights to objects of intellectual property, desiring to achieve maximum gain at the expense of hampering the overall progress of civilization.
0 comments:
Post a Comment