January 3, 2004 - 6:40am -- hydrarchist
Karl Fogel writes:
The Promise of a Post-Copyright World
Karl Fogel
There is one group of people not shocked by the record industry's
recent decision to sue randomly chosen file sharers: historians of
copyright. They already know what everyone else is slowly finding
out: that copyright was never about paying artists for their work, and
that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was
designed by and for distributors — that is,
publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the
Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer
makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized
distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but
desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and
aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can
and can't be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would
allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a
return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which
copying and borrowing openly from others' works is simply a normal
part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one's sources and
of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists
need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it
has always been.
