William Patry, who usually is a bit more mature
about such things, has chosen twice
in the last
week to dedicate a lengthy blog entry criticizing the Copyright Alliance,
once comparing me to Joe McCarthy (he has since deleted that reference). It's
hard to know with him where his commentary ends and Google's begins, given he
is their senior copyright counsel. I'm choosing to believe he doesn't speak for
the whole organization, because his commentary doesn't reflect other, more
positive feedback I've heard privately from Google executives.

His two entries are unfortunately rather childish and far beneath his  impressive intellect, and as such are not worth commenting on, but I thought a line at the end of his first entry
was revealing as to the flawed approach of Mr. Patry's thinking:

"Lets skip the flatulent rhetoric about government
intervention and get down to the real issue: finding the policy that does the
most good for the most people; and when we do we'll be thankful to have the
government intervene."

Overlooking the reference to passing gas (which admittedly
is hard), and the fact that he uses both a colon and a semi-colon in one
sentence (hard for me, as I've had editors who would have whacked me for such an offense),
look at the dependent clause in the middle - "finding the policy that does the
most good for the most people." He assumes this is in fact the best course of
action in IP policy, and all should logically agree with it.

Wrong.

Enlightenment philosophers and the founding fathers all
shared a fear of a "tyranny of the majority," where the larger group can
dominate, and subjugate, the smaller group. We see it in sectarian conflicts
around the world to this day, and I fear will continue to see them. The only
way to combat such tyranny is to ensure the minority has some rights, some
checks on the majority's power, some say over its daily life.

What does this have to do with IP?

What is the ratio of artists to consumers in this country?

I suspect Web 2.0-heads would say everyone is a creator, and
thus the ratio is a perfect 1:1 ratio. But if I record a song and put it on a
MySpace page, will there be a great demand to download it? (Hint: probably
not.) Throughout history, there have always been a small few in society who
could tell stories, make music, act out dramas and comedies, and paint moving
images. The rest of society benefited from the specific genius of these few creators.

This is no different today, and the paparazzi focus on
celebrity in today's society proves the point. But whether the creator is a
famous director like Steven Spielberg or an author like Truman Capote, or is a
graphic artist who designed the label of the organic milk you're pouring into
your cereal, they are all creators. They are all practicing a gift they have
that we don't, yet we are all benefiting from it.

Emphasis again - we are all benefiting from it.

All of society, every last one of us, benefits when art is
created. Art is created when artists have incentives to create. Those
incentives are there when they are given some guarantee of rights related to
their creations.

All of society is harmed when the focus is on consumers at
the expense of creators, which is true of most schemes promoted by those
resistant to artists' rights in the digital age. In the short term everything
would seem fine; we have a lot of existing content out there that we could
raid, it was created before the incentives changed.

But it would be absolutely wrong to assume the same level,
and quality, of creation would continue after incentives for creation involving
rights were removed. Over time, how many authors, songwriters, film makers,
photographers, musicians and game designers would go into a more "normal" line
of work out of simple financial need? Many. And don't even try to tell me the
solution is patronage; we want artists walking around with their hats out
looking for charity combined with a little say from the funder in what
direction the art should go?

The next time you hear a critic of copyright, particularly
one employed by a company where copyright serves only as a business obstacle to
its use of others' content to make money, be very cautious when you hear the
words "do the most good for the most people." The group that's getting thrown
off the bus is artists.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 3:41 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, founding fathers, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.