The piece is by M. Zachary Johnson, a composer and musicologist in the NYC area. I wasn’t previously familiar with Mr. Johnson’s work, but I hope he remains engaged in the debate, because he articulates quite clearly the frustration of creators when told all of their effort in creation matters not once their work is converted to ones and zeroes. A passage from the piece:

The fact that it is easier to copy these things does not eliminate the creator’s sovereignty over his own product. The price of his work, even if it is $0, is his to set.

Absolutely right. He then elaborates on that point a bit later in the piece:

So a creator’s right is not per se to the particular physical instance, but to the creative content that is embodied in these objects. And the only practical way for a creator to control and profit from his work is for him to hold by right the power to decide when, where, how and under what conditions new physical instances of his creation may be made and distributed. That is the meaning of the right to copy.

Now where the author starts to lose me a bit is in his condemnation of what he calls the “progressive” model of education that he feels focuses more on emotion and socialization than fact. As someone who helps both of his kids with homework, I would say that a lot of facts are being taught in schools today. I just don’t think a lot of facts regarding intellectual property are being taught. It’s not so much the method as it is the subject matter. (Here at the Copyright Alliance, we are working with educators to remedy that.)

Mr. Johnson is focused on the moral attitude of those who would infringe copyright. It’s a legitimate avenue to pursue. Clearly many if not most infringers know what they are doing is at least illegal, and if they feel it is not wrong there is probably some rationalization occurring related to their distrust of large corporations (one of Mr. Johnson’s theories), or their own lack of money (although they generally don’t apply the same rationale to physical goods), or the fact that everyone is doing it (the “diffusion of responsibility” example), or some lack of respect for rules or authority. And in some cases, it may simply be an ignorance of law and moral correctness; they may honestly believe that if the works are there online for free than it must be that it is intentional on the part of the owner. I think that circle of infringers is getting smaller, however.

The point I’m getting at is that I’m reluctant to apply motives regarding morality to those who I feel disrespect the rights of creators by devaluing the worth of their product simply because it is digitized. I can disagree with them vehemently but it is not my place to pass judgment on them. I am dismissed frequently by some proponents of reduced rights online, and they will use language that is quite harsh, crude, immature and off-point (typical of the blogosphere and policy debates, unfortunately), but the general theme is that I am considered an apologist for large companies. Large companies and individual artists all own copyrights, they are all in this Alliance, and I will defend them all large and small. These same opponents also often suggest I say what I do because of who my members are; I say I serve my members because I believe in their cause.

I am willing to accept at face value that foes believe in the principles in which they are promoting, even if I feel they are mistaken. I always wish the same courtesy be applied to me, although that happens less often than I’d like. Given that desire on my part, I won’t go so far as Mr. Johnson in ascribing motives to opponents.

But I do welcome his piece, which is articulate and thought-provoking.

A new analysis says no, it doesn’t. An article in The Register describes it far better than I can, but the essence is that even in the digital age, where in theory anyone can access anything they want, most people still pursue the same number of creative works they always have. Essentially demand follows something called a Log Normal distribution, which is what has been charted in this area for at least 50 years and heavily weights a small portion of works.

Now the analysts providing evidence debunking Anderson’s work — economist Will Page and Mblox founder Andrew Bud — are a bit blunt, even harsh. I wrote at the time Anderson’s book came out that he made some tremendous leaps of faith, extrapolating a small amount of data across numerous industries without studies to support his arguments. That said, there’s something intuitive about the Long Tail in a digital age, in that it is easier to find more obscure works if you’re looking for them, and that would seem good for creators who didn’t make it big. Would the tail be larger than the head? No, but one can assume there would be more demonstrable interest in works in the tail in a digital era because it’s hard to measure interest before that era when the works simply couldn’t be found.

The Arts & Labs blog has an interesting perspective on this. Essentially, they argue that the conclusions by Page and Bud are already visible in the marketplace, because online distribution companies are fighting tooth and nail to gain access to the high-quality creative works most in demand by consumers. I agree with that. Every time I’m at Digital Hollywood I fear sitting down at a lunch or dinner table, because it’s always filled with distribution entrepreneurs convinced (incorrectly) that I can somehow help them make a deal with one of my corporate members. It’s enough to make me want to hole up in my hotel room and order room service.

There’s another perspective here as well, however. Those works out there on the tail; how were they produced, given that they are so unlikely to earn enough to pay for themselves? Many of them were self-produced, but not all. Most sound recordings, motion pictures, books, etc., do not turn a profit. Yet they are still produced. Is it because creative industries are filled with idiots?

Don’t answer that. I will, though; they are in fact not. Nobody, and I mean nobody, knew that some obscure southern lawyer named John Grisham or an insurance salesman named Tom Clancy would become runaway bestsellers. Every publisher of every long tail work hoped that the work would turn a profit. That’s why they took a chance on the work. But they can afford to take the chance because a few works — like The Firm or The Hunt for Red October — climb up the Y curve of the head and subsidize the production of all of those other works. To put it in Silicon Valley terms, the head provides the venture capital for the tail.

This is a virtuous relationship that has existed with creative works as long as there has been a way to produce them and market them to consumers. That hasn’t changed with the advent of the Internet, because the Internet hasn’t changed that unpredictable nature of consumer appetites. So however we measure the tail, and whether there is in fact a tail as Anderson depicts, let’s remember that we need to ensure the rights of creators are preserved so all works we enjoy can be created, profitable and unprofitable.

Three major publishers have called for the adoption of the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) standards by picture archives, photographers and all other image suppliers. Representatives of McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson each announced that they will adopt the PLUS Picture Licensing Glossary definitions in their contracts, and that they encourage image suppliers to begin embedding PLUS license metadata in all images within one year. The publishers voiced their support at the “PLUS Takes Root in the Publishing Industry” event hosted by the Picture Archive Council of America, during their International Conference in New York City.

(Disclaimer: the Picture Archive Council of America is a Copyright Alliance member, as is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, part of Reed Elsevier.)

This agreement means three major publishers will be working with a common licensing technology that will be used by all sorts of visual artists along with archivists, museums, libraires, etc. It allows photographs to be properly identified and commercial transactions to be facilitated, to be overly simplistic about it. Bill Rosenblatt of DRM Watch has a nice description of it, in which he says this:

Standardization of licensing terms should also lead to a more economically efficient market for stock images, because licensees will be better able to make apples-to-apples comparisons of rights among licensors and to license only the rights they need…

PLUS is on a positive, if deliberate, trajectory as it labors to keep its many constituents happy while developing its specs and its momentum. It’s close to our ideal of an open standard: pragmatic, focused, not over-engineered, and an economic win-win for all parties.

Given the number of parties involved, you could add a few more “wins” to that description, but I nit-pick. We very much like market-driven win-wins here at the Copyright Alliance.

That is happening with dramatic frequency every day, it seems, reminding us again that piracy is not limited to music and motion pictures. An Associated Press story cited a study by Attributor (disclaimer — a Copyright Alliance member) from late last week finding that readership of newspaper stories online is nearly one-and-a-half times as likely to occur off of a newspaper’s site than on it. The study is available free on the Attributor web site.

That’s a lot of lost revenue. Every US newspaper chain has seen their market caps dry up such that GM’s problems seem a walk in the park. According to Digital Deliverance, NYT is down 75% in six years. McClatchey, down 95% over three years. Media General, down 83% over four years. Gannett, down 65% in four years. Those four companies combined account for about 160 daily newspapers. Even though every reader of news stories online knows the biggest asset of any newspaper is the intellectual output it produces — the gathering and combining of facts in a readable and comprehensive way — the market sees its biggest asset as the building a newspaper houses, something that will never produce a single news story.

The US Congress and Henry Paulson aren’t going to bail out this industry that is so critical to a functioning democracy. And readers online aren’t going to either if they are unwittingly undermining the producers of these works by reading them in ways that the producers can’t monetize them. (Note I’m giving many online readers the benefit of the doubt, that unlike most P2P and BitTorrent users today downloading music and movies, many reading news stories on various sites are not aware that they are robbing the author and his or her publisher much-needed revenue. The guilty parties here are the ones that relocate the works to monetize them themselves or use the works to increase traffic.)

Helping restore the revenue stream is where Attributor can play a role. The company already tracks the appearance of news stories produced by AP, Reuters and others across billions of web pages, giving news producers real-time information as to the dissemination — authorized or not — of their works across the web.

Attributor’s Rich Pearson said in the news account that their study showed news producers were losing $150,000 to as much as $1 million annually in lost ad revenues as a result of these unauthorized story views. (Those totals, while dismaying, also convey how poorly online ad revenues compare to print ones, at least for now as print remains popular with a dwindling segment of the population.) It should also be noted that Attributor was not looking to scoop up what would be considered fair use quotes in blogs and other sites. They only counted works that included at least 50 percent of the original work and contained more than 125 words.

Fair use is important, it explicitly permits commentary, and that has allowed our society to have more free discourse than any other on Earth. But there is a difference between taking an excerpt from a story to make a point, and reprinting that story without permission. Reprinting on a web page is no different than reprinting in a separate newspaper, which we’ve also seen. (The latest example of that involved plagiarized obituaries.)

Readers need to be more careful about the sources producing the news they’re reading, and news producers need to be more vigilant about tracking their works and protecting their copyrights. The cut-and-paste culture is common online, and it’s not one newspapers are used to. Jayson Blair doesn’t come along every day, but online thievery occurs every minute. For the sake of all of us who value well-sourced, well-reported, well-written and well-edited news stories, let’s hope that news producers can properly be paid for their work.

ADDENDUM: Rich has pointed out to me that in fact the study went beyond newspapers (a pet subject of mine) and examined feeds from more than 100 publisher sites across a variety of content categories. Again, worth examining their study, available at attributor.com/.

Tennessee’s governor signed into law yesterday a crackdown on university piracy that mirrors in many ways the higher ed language, but likely will have more teeth given that many prominent places of higher learning in Tennessee are in fact state-owned institutions.

Some universities in Tennessee have already been pursuing creative ways of approaching student education. We found with our academic symposium last year and in other ways that many universities never mention one single thing about possible infringement on campus networks. That is not the case with Vanderbilt University, which informs its students upon arrival on campus as freshmen. But it doesn’t stop there. It brings in songwriters and authors and other creators to discuss what copyright means to them, and also operates a first-year seminar class where students work to develop new legal distribution models for creative works.

The Copyright Alliance is busy developing K-12 materials in conjunction with an educational group and school districts to help teachers work copyright education into their course discussions, and we host links to many quality programs for K-16 on our web site. This is important, because as well-intentioned as higher-education institutions like Vanderbilt may be, it’s tough to turn around an 18-teen-year-old who is set in her ways. (I’ve been working on my 13-year-old since she was around 8, and my 10-year-old since around 5). Still, I applaud the efforts that higher education institutions are making and were making even before passage of legislation. It’s only appropriate that educators educate their students on the law, and on lawful use of university-owned facilities.

Fricklas noted that copyright, like any other property right, “helps create free markets,” and that any alternative to copyright — a government or other collective tax system, relying purely on private contracts — is inferior, a point we’ve made here on this blog. He also expressed frustration with opponents of copyright who “deliberately disregard the distinction between ‘idea’ and ‘expression’ that is at the very core of copyright, creating the misimpression that copyright ‘locks up’ culture and ideas.” This is a shibboleth that pops up frequently, and it does get tiring to have to repeatedly point out, as Fricklas does, that copyrighted creations actually bring ideas to the marketplace, where they can be discussed and embraced without any threat to the copyrighted expression of the author.

Thornburgh wondered if young people who had grown up surrounded by free, if unauthorized, copyrighted works truly understood the property aspect of copyright. There was some consensus on this opinion, although Fricklas saw as a bigger problem opportunists who create sites or services that seek to create a veneer of legitimacy that isn’t in fact there. He agreed that “older generations are able to understand that nothing is free for long. Their values are more consistent with the general notion that rules are for the public benefit and that sneaking into a movie or listening to a stolen song are both wrong.” Armitage also was reluctant to point fingers at the nation’s youth, saying that making “appreciation of and respect for intellectual property rights as pervasive and intuitive as it is for conventional forms of property protection remains an unfulfilled challenge.”

Smith saw significant progress being made in the international arena, pointing to a major bust done by the FBI and the People’s Security Bureau of China, aided by Microsoft, that stopped a syndicate selling counterfeit software worth $2 billion to 36 countries on five continents. He said US officials have provided “strong support” and are spreading the word internationally on the harms of piracy and counterfeiting. Fricklas saw an understanding of the piracy threat in the U.K. and France, but expressed concerns with other trading partners such as China, Russia, Spain and Sweden, which he said often cite privacy concerns to cloak piracy from legal action. Here again Fricklas noted that developing countries would cit the “lock up ideas” argument in resisting honoring copyrights of outside creators but sought (reasonably) to protect the rights of their own creators. He argued these nations need to understand that they should protect their own works and others because their growing economies “cannot make a sensible difference between pirating some content and disrespecting the rights of the creators of others.”

Smith and Fricklas both praised last year’s agreement on User Generated Content Principles with Viacom, Disney, NBC Universal, Fox Entertainment, CBS, MySpace, Veoh Networks and Dailymotion, principles that provided some clear agreement on how to address “sharing” of copyrighted works. Fricklas said it removed much of the “legal cloud” surrounding UGC among the participants, and he regretted Google’s YouTube still hasn’t joined. Smith noted that “[w]hen it comes to copyright and the Internet, we are in a very fluid time, where business models, technology and consumer expectations are all changing rapidly.” He is absolutely right, and he was also right when he said that “voluntary agreements can adapt to change more easily than legislation, and allow for experimentation in new rules or modifications to existing rules,” a point we made at the time.

It is a fluid time, but all three noted that market players are responding. Smith discussed the steps Microsoft has taken to embrace open-source, and Fricklas cited examples of new distribution of creative works, such as Colbernation.com, where a fan of the faux conservative can see each and every episode and send high-quality clips to friends or embed them in blogs.

While piracy clearly undermines a free market for creative property, as Fricklas said, it also will continue to adapt and thrive, as Smith said. What will help is more cooperation, as the UGC model shows, and more appreciation for business model changes, as the Colbert site shows. I’m going to end by quoting Fricklas at length, and hope he views this excerpt as fair use:

IP is always about balance. We are all both users and creators of IP, and have an interest in seeing reasonable parameters on protection and in reducing those areas where innovation is chilled because of uncertainty.

The core case for copyright IP is very strong: the U.S. core copyright industries accounted for an estimated $819.06 billion or 6.56% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005. As a society and
as an economy we need to protect the enormous costs attendant to the creation of compelling, diverse programming by large organizations and the creative efforts and professional livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of authors, filmmakers, photographers, songwriters and performers.

At the same time, in an industry changing as rapidly as ours, debate is inevitable and close calls abound. I don’t think IP is threatened, but I do think we need to meet with our critics and need to continue to make the defense to ensure that the public and policymakers have a balanced and
reasonably nuanced perspective. It is enormously important that we get the answers right.

At the NMPA, I am fortunate to work on behalf of people who inspire us with their work on a daily basis – songwriters. Their words and music have the power to move and motivate and excite us.

I think of how many young runners must hear the opening bars of the theme from “Chariots of Fire” in their minds before a big race. Major League Baseball serenades players with their own “theme song” when they are up to bat. And millions of Americans witnessed Michael Phelps listening to his iPod this summer in Beijing. We all understand that music has the power to inspire greatness.

It is with purpose that I mention these ties between music and athletes because it has also been my blessing to work with another group of inspiring people - athletes at the DC Special Olympics. The NMPA has been proud to serve as the Presenting Sponsor for the DC Special Olympics’ Fall Sports Classic for the last two years, and - as is frequently the case with community service – the benefits to those who volunteer far outweigh the contribution.

More than 500 athletes of all ages have spent the year training for this weeklong series of competitions, which concluded Monday. The event includes golf, tennis, basketball, bocce and bowling at venues throughout the DC area.

For nearly 40 years, the Special Olympics has inspired these athletes to achieve and instilled in them the self-esteem that comes from competition. At events across the world, participants demonstrate their courage and passion, as well as experience the joy of sport. And while the program is designed to directly benefit the athletes, I can tell you that the benefits as a volunteer are unlimited.

The Special Olympics athletes’ oath is inspiring to anyone, whatever the goal: “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt.” These athletes have so much desire to simply share their gifts with their family, friends and fans; they remind us all to have such passion in our own lives.

The DC Special Olympics committee motto is Inspire Greatness, and as a long time volunteer with their organization I can say without a doubt, these athletes do just that.

Today Cato provided a platform to Michele Boldrin, economics professor at Washington University at St. Louis, and Levine’s co-author of a book titled “Against Intellectual Monopoly.” In his opening remarks, he said: 1) The fact that farmers in one part of southern Spain were able to learn farming techniques from farmers in another part of Spain means that knowledge passes freely without IP protection. Hmm. 2) Ideas are public goods, so anyone producing a creative work with ideas should find a way to extract rents from that production without IP protection. Hmm. 3) They can do this by being “very quick,” recouping as much as possible before the darknet steals all customers. Essentially that was the argument Levine gave at the previous Cato event. Hmm.

I’ll let others debate what the sponsorship of these panel discussions says about Cato, and instead focus on responses from Robert Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). (Thank you, Cato, for including such a sharp respondent.) It was interesting to watch Boldrin, a very expressive individual, alternately frowning and eyebrow-raising as Atkinson stepped his way through a long critique of the Boldrin-Levine work.

Atkinson noted that: 1) While the book contained some proposals for reform, it was explicitly calling for elimination of intellectual property, and in fact the book repeatedly claimed that studies suggested all parties would benefit from its removal, although Atkinson found no study that truly documented that claim. Boldrin replied that he is politically realistic and knows you must start with reform before you can get to full elimination. 2) There is no focus on incentives for innovation in the book, essential if you are to discuss IP. Boldrin replied that innovation occurs often without incentives, a position Atkinson strongly disputed. 3) It was backwards to claim the Internet means creators should have to extract rents more quickly now after release, as the digital age shows it’s even harder to do so as pirated works produce that much more quickly. 4) The book sees price falling to zero but ignores the fact that in that scenario, revenues fall to zero. 5) The book as an unfortunate tendency toward diatribe, such as calling IP “evil,” referring to US Supreme Court justices as having double-digit IQs and suggesting that those who support copyright don’t appreciate facts.

Atkinson took the discussion one level higher (I was inclined to take it one level lower to the practical, as I’ll explain below). Atkinson called Boldrin a neoclassical economist, focused on producers extracting necessary rents. In contrast, Atkinson called himself a Schumpeterian, focused on the innovation and productivity. Thus, as I’ll put in my own language, not Atkinson’s, Boldrin is looking at the end of the conveyor belt and figuring out how best to distribute that product to consumers, while Atkinson is focused on making sure someone makes that product to begin with, and that someone else is coming up with an improved product or better yet a radical replacement.

As a Schumpeterian myself (see our video on the introduction to copyright, as well as many blog entries), I think Atkinson is right on the money. Copyright, and IP in general, is all about incentives. Rights are given — a limited monopoly is created — to encourage authors and inventors to produce writings and discoveries. This comes from the “Progress Clause” of the US Constitution, aptly named, as a focus only on use of end-products will soon leave you with fewer end-products.

Much of the give-and-take after the presentations focused on the publishing industry, to my surprise. Having played numerous roles in that industry, including six years as a freelance writer, I couldn’t resist jumping in. Boldrin said publishers only needed six months of copyright because they make most of their revenues there.

This ignores several points: 1) Digital piracy has not hit this industry as much as others, but we can’t assume what length of copyright they’d need for profit based just on current data. 2) Publishers publish based on having a long copyright. If they know that in six months it will be legal for me to download a free copy and you to print up beautiful bound copies that you’ll sell for one-third the price (you don’t have to cover the fixed cost of paying the writer and employing editors in an office), they will simply not publish as many books. Already most books fail to earn back their investment and are subsidized by bestsellers. Many of those will no longer be published, a loss to the Long Tail users who found the non-bestsellers valuable. (Afterward I talked at length with some attendees about other benefits to society of longer copyrights, using a John Grisham example, but I won’t get into it here; if someone wishes to hear it, post a comment.)

Boldrin refused to acknowledge directly that a 6-month copyright term would lead to fewer books; instead he started throwing around profitability numbers in the publishing industry, as if this had any bearing on the subject at hand. Atkinson noted that with copyright there is always a choice between level of access to existing works (he called it “freedom”) and incentives to create and distribute new works, and it seemed Boldrin was willing to sacrifice future creation of works for more freedom with existing ones. Boldrin didn’t dispute that.

Some critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act say that it stifles technological innovation, and we’ll never know the true cost because you can’t count something that never appears. I am more skeptical of the notion of the DMCA repressing innovation than they are, but admit the impact is hard to calculate. What is empirically obvious, though, is that diminishing the rights of creators leads to less incentive to create and distribute. How much would our culture be deprived? Again, you can’t count something that never appears. But it would be a loss indeed, and it’s one I’m not eager to accept.

The idea I’m about to put forward is not even half-baked, in fact I haven’t even put it in the oven yet. But it can’t be any less helpful than the advice Benjamin is given for a career path: “Plastics.”

Over and over, at conferences, in books, in blogs, in newspapers, in conversations, the same theme keeps coming up. Creative industries know how to make money in a physical age. Now that their work is online — whether they like it or not — they’re trying to monetize those works. They can be monetized, but I’ve yet to see a model where online revenues per use or purchase of work exceed the physical world.

Now some out there wouldn’t really care about that. They probably think creators make too much money. But as I was saying today from the audience at a conference (I’ll blog on that soon), when you reduce the possible revenue awaiting a set of works in the market, that lower expected return meets the inherent risk in any creative venture, and some works that would have been funded and launched in the old model won’t in the new model. Contributions to our culture, each one according to the Long Tail likely to please at least some of us, won’t be produced or distributed.

This is a real problem, and so it’s inherent upon all of us in the culture to find new ways to generate revenues online for creators.

Right now there are really only a few models at work: 1) Purchase a download. This is basically analogous to buying something in the store, but it’s not been widely adopted by consumers, at least not on the scale of traditional physical sales, and price points are forced low by the free alternatives of piracy, further making it difficult to raise sufficient revenues. 2) Subscription model. Nobody thinks oddly of subscribing to a digital cable TV tier, but many dislike the idea of a subscription music service. I like my Napster to Go, but it is odd that the music will go away if I cancel my subscription or if the company goes under, and this produces very little revenue indeed for musicians and songwriters. 3) Ad-supported. This is what is pushed at places like Digital Hollywood, but consumers have never liked ads. DVRs are allowing us to skip through TV commercials, many viewers will abandon a video site if they use even a short pre-roll ad, nobody looks at display ads while listening to streaming radio, advertisers fear the less predictable environment of the Internet, and plenty of software is out there that can block or hide many online ads.

What if we’re thinking about this all wrong? We’re thinking about the existing Internet as we know and use it, and trying to shoehorn monetization of creative works into that model. What if we did some re-engineering of how we used the Internet? Now I’m not going to claim the model I’m proposing below is original to me, I’m sure brighter minds have envisioned it before, but I don’t see why it isn’t here yet.

This doesn’t require the redesign of TCP/IP. It doesn’t require monitoring by ISPs or some collective agency formed by a “voluntary” collective license. It simply requires a plug-in to your browser.

Under this scenario (and keep in mind I’m not a technologist), digital creative works such as sound recordings, TV shows, motion pictures, e-books, etc. would have metadata related to their price. This could burrow all the way down to an article from a newspaper (that industry needs some help quick or we won’t have newspaper web sites because there will be no newspapers). Maybe even some blogs might want to charge, say, a penny for each entry. The plug-in on the browser would track all of these fees; it doesn’t care if it’s 5 cents for an AP story vs. $10 for a motion picture. The computer user would have a credit card associated with the plug-in, and every time a transaction occurred the charge would be made (credit card companies might not like penny transactions, so the plug-in could collect charges until it hit a minimum threshold).

This model already exists with mobile phones. If you don’t have an unlimited text plan, every text message you send might cost ten cents, but you’re not asked to authorize ten cents every time; it just shows up on your bill. You can use services like VCast to download games, gadgets, ringtones, etc. It shows up on your bill. You don’t have to worry about using a credit card each time, and for the most part the costs are modest.

The plug-in could have a default where you have to authorize every time, and then you could disable that to make the experience smoother. Perhaps a little window could pop up briefly like Outlook does when you get an email, letting you know you just paid ten cents for the front page of The New York Times. There would be clear pricing info available wherever you went and found creative works that were part of this network. You could also have safety protocols to keep your thirteen-year-old daughter from using your browser with the plug-in to fill her iPod (can you tell that’s a directly personal concern with me?).

This won’t eliminate free. But we keep being told people are willing to pay at the right price and at the right ease of use. This system would certainly provide the latter. It would be up to the creators to set the price, and presumably the market would tell them if the price seemed reasonable. I would think many people would welcome a way to have a mobile phone experience at home, getting what they want when they want it without having to worry overly much about sweating the small stuff.

A system like this removes transaction costs from the purchase of all works, particularly popular ones such as motion pictures and sound recordings, but it also provides a way for everyone from writers to photographers to do those famous micropayments we heard so much about at one time that still haven’t arrived.

This of course requires a lot of participants. Someone has to come up with the plug-in, then figure out how to get paid for its development (perhaps a pool of industries fund its development?) Then you need creative industries that generally have no reason to work together to start implementing the rather laborious process of not just adding metadata to new works but going back deep into the archives. We’ve already heard stories about how difficult it’s been to convert older works to digital.

Still, when it comes to monetizing works online it seems we’re going nowhere fast. Jobs are being lost daily in creative fields; just read the latest press releases of any major newspaper or newspaper chain. For all of us who value creative works, we have an obligation to share in the search for a solution, or series of solutions.

I would very much welcome feedback from readers on how this model could be improved and if it is even feasible.

What does the election of Barack Obama mean to copyright, to the protection of rights abroad and to the continued incentive system for creators? We’ve addressed that before in comparing his copyright agenda to that of Senator John McCain (both stated a strong understanding of its importance economically) and we noted that Obama’s running mate, Senator Joe Biden, is a stalwart promoter of creators’ rights and a co-founder of the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus. But there’s a larger perspective here that needs noting — copyright fits perfectly with Obama’s inspiring message throughout this campaign, a message of hope, a message of bringing parties together in a common purpose.

Yesterday I responded to a request from K.C. Jones of Information Week regarding an Obama copyright agenda, and here’s a passage from the story:

Copyright Alliance executive director Patrick Ross agreed with technology leaders and joined them in praising Obama’s knowledge of technology. He said that the next U.S. president has demonstrated a “clear understanding of the critical role copyright industries play in creating jobs and stimulating the economy.”

“Given the fact that he has placed improving our troubled economy as Job One for his administration, we in the Copyright Alliance are confident that his efforts will include strong copyright protection,” Ross said Wednesday. “Copyright has always been a bipartisan issue, supported broadly by Democrats and Republicans alike, as the votes approving the recent PRO-IP Act showed. The president-elect has made it clear he will be looking for opportunities to reach across party lines and build consensus, and copyright provides him an excellent opportunity to do so.”

We have repeatedly made the economic argument and will continue to do so because it has become more central than ever in these troubled times. But that last point needs to be emphasized more. Copyright truly is a consensus issue, with people and policymakers of all stripes recognizing its value. A few vocal blogs and a few sympathetic media outlets tend to create this notion of a war between creative industries and, well, I suppose consumers, but such a war doesn’t really exist.

Creative works are more popular than ever. The overwhelming sale of iPods have shown that consumers will accept certain restrictions when they see value. (That said, I wish Apple would choose to be more interoperable with other music systems.) Quality online outlets like Hulu.com can find large and legal audiences overnight and return revenues to the owners almost immediately. New devices such as the e-book reader Kindle ignite renewed interest in reading.

A handful of advocacy groups may have wished otherwise, but the fact is, when Americans went to vote Tuesday, they weren’t voting for some ill-defined concept like digital freedom. Americans by and large don’t think about copyright, and this is because the system works and they have access to all of the creative works they could possibly imagine.

If copyright law and protection were curtailed, and the production of those works declined, we would be alarmed and let our policymakers know our frustration, but for now we can continue pressing our leaders on the very real and immediate problems of access to affordable health care, rising costs for energy and food, declining values of homes and 401(k) portfolios, increasing layoffs and negative job growth. Thank goodness we will continue to have a good book or TV show to facilitate a brief escape from these problems.

We’ve seen about two dozen new members of the House of Representatives and about ten or so new senators elected this week. Many incumbents in both houses lost. Members of Congress know they are going to be up for re-election, and they’re not about to do anything to jeopardize that. They truly are “representatives” of their constituents. So when the House votes 409-10 on the PRO-IP Act, that suggests that a pretty overwhelming majority of House members, who were facing re-election just months after the vote, feel confident that this was in the best interest of the voters in their district. They were right.

As I told Information Week, copyright is one of those very few truly bipartisan issues. Supporting creators’ rights means everybody wins, from artists to consumers to our culture. There is a long history of consensus among policymakers on the issue; as an example just look at the hostilities that have flared up between Senators Leahy and Hatch over judicial nominations, and compare that to their enthusiasm at co-sponsoring legislation together promoting creators.

Politics doesn’t have to be personal. Obama is a shining example of that. I am fully confident he will welcome the opportunity to work with both Democrats and Republicans to ensure that, just as he said in his tech policy paper, copyright owners see their rights respected and enforced both at home and abroad.

We in the Copyright Alliance — our individual creators, our artist coalitions, our unions, our corporations, and our trade associations — look forward to working with him in this area, to boost our economy, create jobs, and encourage the creation of new works for all of us.