HOLLYWOOD, Cal. – I had the pleasure yesterday of serving on a panel on copyright and convergence with moderator Doug Lichtman of UCLA, Matt Zinn of TiVo and Fred von Lohmann of EFF. I guess not surprisingly, the panel ended up largely being a debate between me and Fred, although Doug is so knowledgeable and right-thinking on copyright that at times I intentionally remained silent, knowing Doug wouldn't be able to resist jumping in despite his moderator's role (I was right). Fred, of course, is a more than capable debate partner, being a longtime student of copyright law and a veteran of such panels. He also is more reasonable than some of the blogosphere, but his perspective tends to be on empowering infringers, not rightsholders.

I won't rehash all of the details of the panel — I believe that the organizers at some point will post a podcast of the session and I'll link to that then — but let me pull out just a couple of points.

1. Fred promoted his 5-year-old plan to place musical performing artists into a "voluntary" licensing regime. My problems with this plan would be longer than this blog software can probably accommodate, but his proposal is flawed at its very premise, where he says the goal is to see artists get paid. I too want artists to get paid, but by allowing them to exercise their own rights, not to be forced into a collective, whether "voluntary" (which is a chimera) or compulsory.

2. The plan has always singled out musical performing artists, presumably because they were the first victims of P2P infringement. But if the model truly is respectful of artists' rights and is market-friendly, why limit it to one form of creator? Why shouldn't novelists be put in a similar regime, given the runaway success of Amazon's Kindle? Laughable, right? (I hope you find it laughable.) There's no reason to single out one form of creator for diluted rights, just because infringers find their works more popular.

3. Oddball moment of the panel — Fred compared the development, production and marketing of creative works like musical sound recordings to the manufacture of optical disk drives and cement. Yes, cement. I was so speechless it took me a bit to reply, but let me do again more vigorously now. Creative works are not mass-produced optical disk drives. Creative works are not cement. You may make millions of copies of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" but there is only one "Kashmir." By definition, every single creative work is unique. "Kashmir" is not "Crazy." If these works were not unique — if they were not the ultimate definition of scarcity — we wouldn't see the flow of traffic of infringing material on P2P. After all, how many optical disk drives do we need? To riff on what I wrote in an earlier entry, the US Constitution does not choose, in its only use of the word "right" in its unamended body, to extend rights to the makers and owners of cement. It's a good thing, because I enjoy walking on sidewalks without interference, and more importantly, I have a really hard time telling various uses of cement apart.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 11:53 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.