RIAA Behaving Badly; Let's Cut Their Copyright Privileges

RIAA Behaving Badly; Let’s Cut Their Copyright Privileges — Wolfe’s Den Blog — InformationWeek:

Innocent con­sumers are being both­ered by another round of the record indus­try behav­ing badly, via more law­suits and anti-copying threats. This time, though, I’ve got a solu­tion. We should do what we do to chil­dren who mis­be­have: Take away their priv­i­leges. Here’s the deal.

How about we cut the copy­right terms down to five years. Retroactively. So now “Stairway to Heaven” is in the pub­lic domain. Hey, the ongo­ing RIAA law­suit prob­lem is gone in one fell swoop.

Do I hear some objec­tions in the court­room, like if we cut down copy­right pro­tec­tions, artists lose out? This would be a legit­i­mate com­plaint if artists really ben­e­fited cur­rently from copy­right. But they mostly don’t. It’s gen­er­ally the large cor­po­ra­tions who extract the max­i­mum ben­e­fit from their rights, and then trickle a lit­tle of it down to song­writ­ers and authors. (Even a lit­tle blog­ger such as myself doesn’t own the rights to his own words; my employer does. Yeah, I know: “But they give you a job and they pay you.” Whatever.)

What about those who say copy­rights are some kind of God-given right, which is our due under a cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem? That’s sim­ply a mis­un­der­stand of their pur­pose. Copyrights, like patents, weren’t imple­mented to pro­tect their own­ers in per­pe­tu­ity. They are part of a del­i­cate dance which attempts to bal­ance soci­etal ben­e­fits against incen­tives for writ­ers and inven­tors. The intent is that you want to incen­tivize peo­ple to push the state of the cre­ative and tech­ni­cal arts, but you don’t want give those folks such over­bear­ing pro­tec­tions that future advances by other inno­va­tors are stifled.

Indeed, that’s the crux of the cur­rent debate over patents, where the think­ing is that there are too many com­pa­nies which are noth­ing more than patent trolls, and that their manip­u­la­tion of the legal sys­tem is sub­vert­ing the intent of the patents in the first place. Fortunately, what’s hap­pen­ing with copy­rights is much eas­ier to parse, mostly thanks to the ham-handed tac­tics of the RIAA.