The Guardian has a report which tells us (apropos my previous post) that there isn’t enough money in advertising to fund tiny startups. Which rather begs the question why anyone thinks there’s enough in it to fund entire newspapers…
Third worst?
Apparently, UK copyright law is the “third worst” in the world, from the point of view of consumers. A gleeful press release from an organisation called Consumer Focus highlights this, based on some rather subjective research and assumptions, and in particular points to the fact that some kinds of format shifting and backing up are technically illegal.
What they don’t mention is the actual consequences for consumers. I am not aware of a slew of lawsuits against people copying their CDs to their iPods, for example. Nor do they mention the benefits to consumers of a strong creative sector, or the costs of piracy.
Consumer Focus is a state funded body in the UK. It’s role is as “statutory consumer champion” and its aim is “persuading businesses… to put consumers at the heart of what they do“. (As a consumer, and in fact as a businessman, this is the first I had heard of them. Perhaps that’s why they’re being abolished).
What I don’t quite understand is how this sort of thing fits with their remit. Surely for businesses to put consumers at the heart of what they do they need to actually be in business, and have something to sell to consumers. Generally speaking the best outcomes for consumers are driven by well functioning markets rather than legislation.
Sometimes, and this is a sign that the market is working well, things happen on their own without any law demanding it. Many DVDs now come with a digital copy to download onto a portable device. For free! Apps bought from the iTunes store can be installed on all your devices not just one. No extra cost! There’s a reason for this and it is because businesses generally, as a matter of good business sense rather than legal obligation, put consumers at their heart.
If this isn’t happening as much as Consumer Focus would like – although it’s an increasing trend for businesses to choose this sort of approach because it’s good for business – it doesn’t necessarily make sense to either blame the law or look to it for a solution.
There are lots of “consumer unfriendly” things that are allowed by law, if you believe that consumer unfriendliness is defined as being anything which stops consumers doing whatever they want. It’s perfectly legal, for example, to charge a lot of money for something rather than a small amount. Rolex can, legally, sell watches for thousands of pounds while Casio, equally legally, can sell them for about a tenner. I’d quite like to be able to buy a Rolex for ten pounds but I can’t. How unfriendly!
It’s also perfectly legal to not sell something at all, and instead rent it to people who turn up in person to experience it. And it’s also legal, in the field of creativity, simply not to create something at all in the first place, to keep it inside your head and deny anyone else the pleasure or enlightenment they might otherwise get from it.
In fact copyright law itself, which is essentially a law which bans doing something (copying), could be argued using the same logic that Consumer Focus applies, to be inherently consumer unfriendly because it makes it illegal to do things which “most people consider to be harmless”.
I wasn’t previously aware that the test for good law was whether or not most people consider something to be harmless. Surely the test of good law is whether or not it produces generally positive outcomes, and incentives, for society as a whole rather than whether a self-selecting group of “most people” consider it to be harmless.
The reason the things that Consumer Focus complains about do or don’t happen is mostly to do with the incentives the law creates (or fails to) rather than legal obligations or exceptions. On the whole, businesses which are wilfully unfriendly to their customers aren’t very good businesses. Writing a law forcing creators or anyone else to do something which they perceive to be harmful to them is a risky business if at the same time you destroy incentives or create unintended consequences.
Perhaps Consumer Focus should have a look at James Gannon’s article (previously linked) before they put out another press release containing the words “Nobody supports large scale copying but …”
And in the meantime they should consider that the “third worst” copyright regime in the world supports more than 2m jobs, 182,000 businesses, £17bn of exports and about 8% of the economy, in the UK alone. Despite the challenges of the internet. This results in enormous, inestimable diversity and choice for UK consumers alongside the huge economic benefits. Who exactly would benefit from further damaging that?
Who needs payment? There’s always advertising…
I suppose the central dilemma for creators on the internet is how hard it is to get paid. Becoming popular, unfortunately, doesn’t often equate to becoming rich. This is a bit odd, and one of the key differences between “old media” and the internet, and I think it’s also the central challenge.
I mentioned previously that one of the oft-suggested ways of addressing this dilemma is to use creative output as the loss leader for something else. People who download your tracks might come to a live performance. People who read your blog might book you to make a keynote speech.
The other way, far more common on the internet, is to sell advertising. Use your popularity to serve up more pages, more pages equals more ads, more ads equals more money.
Sounds fine in theory, but works less well in practice. There is a detailed financial analysis to be done by someone more that way inclined. If I find it I’ll link to it.
But my view on this is quite simple and based on experience and logic.
Experience is that ad revenues don’t grow, in reality, anything like as quickly as traffic. The actual amounts of money to be made are quite pitiful when viewed against the amount of consumption.
Logic says that if everyone relies on advertising to fund their creativity then there isn’t going to be enough money to go round.
Both of these lead to the same outcome: the winners in the ad-funded content game are those who pay little or nothing for content. The investment has to be scaled down to match the size of the opportunity – and when the opportunity is only marginally above zero, the winning model will be the cheapest.
We all know who those winners are – endless sites serving up scraped or “farmed” content, with more investment going into SEO than anything else to maximise traffic. Or the big search and advertising giant itself, Google.
There’s plenty of analysis and de-constructing of this to be done, and doubtless I’ll do more of it at some stage, but actually the simple logic doesn’t require any understanding of the internet at all.
Traditionally creativity, and the huge success of the creative industries, has been funded by a combination of advertising and other revenue sources – principally from actual customers paying for the creative output.
If it is now going to be just advertising, and given that the advertising market is by-and-large static in overall size (or at least doesn’t grow in line with audience and consumption), it means less money is going to be available to invest in creativity.
In my view, more investment in creativity is a good thing. More opportunity for creative people is a good thing. Popularity leading to success is a good thing. So a shrinking opportunity is a bad thing and this is the dilemma which needs to be solved.
For this reason, I think anyone who believes that an ad-funded model leads to good outcomes for creators (and therefore for users) is a mite delusional. Of course, it has its place and always has.
But even if you choose ad funding, rather than having it forced upon you, it’s a pretty tough market. When ad spending moves from offline media to online, a whole load of it gets swallowed by Google and other intermediaries. The bit that’s left is competed for by thousands of new, zero cost, competitors who ae mainly gaming search algorithms to acquire traffic.
But media overall has always thrived on having other sources of revenue too, often direct from the consumer. Some form of cover price. For the most part, and for the time being, these are simply unavailable online.
Charging for content is still a controversial idea, and conflicts with the desire to reach a large audience. This is seen by many as a good thing – cheap is better than expensive, free is better than cheap.
I don’t agree with that, and I think the outcome is the obvious one – you get what you pay for.
How we can move the internet away from the obsession with free is for another post (another few hundred posts). But this much I know: advertising isn’t a viable way to fund creativity online. It wouldn’t be even if every penny of ad revenue went straight to creators.
But with pathetic dribble of revenue which remains after the scalpers and middle men have taken their disproportionate cut, the idea that it can sustain serious enterprise is ridiculous.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy (via James Gannon’s IP Blog)
I think this puts it very well…
How do we know copyright is working?
I have spent a working lifetime sitting on one side of the copyright debate – broadly the “copyright is good” side. I have also, latterly, spent a lot of time listening to people telling me why Im wrong, why I am a dinosaur who cant let go of the past.
Obviously I have spent my career being driven by vested interests – I have worked for companies which are strongly dependent on copyright. So when I have been defending copyright I have also been defending their interests and my own job.
Equally obviously, many if not most of the people on the other side of the debate have vested interests of their own. Search engines and aggregators, academics, thinkers and would-be futurists – even newspaper editors, sometimes – have their own reasons for predicting or relishing the imminent demise of the copyright-based business model.
But what if we step back from both sides of the various vested interests and try to think about what we want, as a society, from copyright. Ignoring the commercial interests, what as an ordinary person can be regarded as a good thing? Perhaps then well have a new perspective from which to consider the polarised opinions being so freely touted.
I had a go at this for a talk I did towards the end of last year. I came up with a list of about fifteen signs that copyright is working well which I managed to distill down to three pithy ones: diversity, investment and reward.
Diversity. A diverse and growing ecosystem of content and creators, leading to a large and increasing choice for consumers, greater access to knowledge and effective and increasing competition for audiences.
Investment. A growing investment of time and money in creating content, products and innovative new ideas which effectively address the needs of the market. Risk-taking by investors and creators, new players entering the market, and a diversification of business models.
Thirdly, and perhaps most all encompassingly, the best and most popular content to be recognised and rewarded. The possibility for big winners to emerge, adaptable, clever companies and creators winning out over slower, less nimble players and not just by appropriating their raw materials from elsewhere.
The reason I think these three things particularly matter is because of the most important outcome of all: access to knowledge and creativity.
Its a good thing if people in general have wide access to the maximum amount of other peoples output and intellect – as well being educational it is the engine of culture and of inspiration and that is the central purpose for which copyright was devised. We are entertained, informed and enriched by other peoples creativity and ensuring that continues has traditionally been the central public good which copyright law seeks to promote.
So: I think a key sign of copyright working well is that lots of people are producing lots of output, and the most popular are the most successful (in whatever terms they judge success – which may or may not be financial).
Am I right about desirable outcomes? If I am, then it provides an interesting backdrop to the debate about if and how copyright needs to change in the internet era. If not, what should they be?
Mish-mashing-up
One of the things copyright is often accused of unfairly preventing, which in turn inhibits creativity and innovation, is so-called “transformative use”. That is, taking someones work as the starting point for your own, and sufficiently changing it so that a new work is created. Currently, in the UK, this mostly still requires a licence because the new work still includes the old one so no one person has the whole copyright. In the US, as a consequence of their “fair use” laws (and a load of litlgation over the years), some of this is allowed. And there are now calls to adopt a similar approach in the UK.
I am always slightly surprised that this is held up as a desirable thing. I sort of assume, rather rudely, that those who advocate it dont have much imagination of their own. Obviously people have been transforming each others work for donkeys years (think about sampling) and equally obviously its not impossible to get permission for this at least some of the time. But I always thought copyright was intended to promote and protect originality. Creatvity, surely. implies creating something. Not just giving something a make-over. New things, rather than iterations of old things. A really nice photocopy, or a cleaned-up photo, surely shouldnt be considered new works in their own right? Thats why copyright doesnt apply unless a work is in some way creative and original.
In fact I have always thought that one of the rather brilliant balancing acts that copyright performs is to prevent appropriation of someones work while allowing – encouraging, even – inspiration. Most original thoughts have their roots in something else. One thing leads to another, and what eventually emerges might bear no similarity at all to the thing which inspired it. You hear a song, and it makes you think, and a bit later a song of your own emerges*
This balancing act is brilliant not just because it creates a sensible compromise but also because it encourages widespread distribution of work. Most creative people are happy and flattered that their work might inspire someone as long as it isnt appropriated… feeling confident of that creates the confidence to publish widely. The more there is out there, the more there is to be inspired by, and the more gets created. If I were a management consultant I would call it a virtuous circle (and send a bill for several thousand pounds).
My questions are these:
Even though its undoubtedly true that transformative works can be brilliant and hugely enjoyable, why does that mean they should be protected by a legal right?
Why shouldnt I, as the creator of something, be able to benefit from the use someone else makes of it?
Equally, why shouldnt I be able to prevent them using it if I dont like what theyre doing? Even if other people think its great, if my work is recognisable in theirs. surely I should have a say?
And, from a public policy point of view, shouldnt we prefer a law that encourages true originality over endless iterations of past work? Which pushes beyond just re-cycling the past, with the risk of creating a colourless hybrid of indeterminate origin in the place of true creativity?
Surely we dont want a world of mash-ups to create a future which is just a mish-mash…
*for people who remember Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, and “Are you ready to be heartbroken”, check out “Lloyd, Im ready to be heartbroken” by Camera Obscura. Twenty years on, not copying or mashing up anything, but the inspiration is clear…
Welcome to the Copyright Blog
I planned this blog with an agenda to put the case for copyright, to bring a positive message about it to the sea of negativity and to explore what the future might hold with an open mind.
There are many voices loudly and frequently raised which rail against copyright. It inhibits entrepeneurialism. It locks knowledge away. It protects the interests of big corporations and restricts the freedom of ordinary people. It inhibits innovation on the internet. And countless variations on the theme.
I disagree with all of these and most others besides. I think – and my long experience confirms – that copyright has been, and still is, a hugely positive driver of many of the things is stands accused of inhibiting. I think its principles are fundamentally right and that while it needs to evolve as the world it exists in evolves that doesnt mean it needs to be destroyed. I think the debate, and the arguments of those who participate in it, are often simplistic, disingenuous and mask commercial interests.
Equally, its obvious that the issues which give rise to all these arguments are real, even if I disagree with the conclusions. The internet changes everything, so it seems, to its tempting to conclude that everything needs to change.
I want this blog to help raise the debate and avoid over-simplification. I want to discuss ideas and perspectives without getting bogged down in quasi-legal academic arguments and pedantic hair-splitting. I want to consider the issues from the same real-world perspective that I have had throughout my career managing, acquiring and exploiting copyrights. I take a practical approach to practical problems and think that is the right way to make copyright fit for the future.
Im not a lawyer and I bring a practitioners perspective to things as I see and understand them. I start this as a true believer and a passionate advocate for all that good that copyright does. Having an open mind means Im willing to be persauded otherwise. I doubt I will be, but it will be interesting to see.
Copyright Blog 