Digital Copyright

Control over copying of analog data is, in practice, made possible by cost: it’s a pain to transcribe a book, it’s hard to make a perfect copy of a record. The cost of copying digital data, however, is near zero. This means that control over copying of digital data is, in practice, impossible.

It’s not hard to control whether anybody can make money using digital data. If somebody is making money, customers are finding them, and that means that you can find them too. If they are making money, you can sue them in court and take away that money. However, there is no practical way to prevent somebody from making a copy without making any money.

There are many industries which exist on the basis of charging per copy–most obviously, the industries which sells CDs, DVDs, and books. When a digital copy is just as good as any other, those industries are dead. They will take a while to die, but they will still die in the reasonably near future.

Historically speaking, none of these industries are very old. So the fact that they are going to die need not be a major problem for most people. I’ve seen occasional arguments that it’s important to find a way to compensate people who create data, as otherwise they won’t do it. That is nonsense. People create things all the time. Art existed long before copyright was invented. The people who will be hurt are the pop stars and the pop star wannabees. It will no longer be possible to make a large fortune in the data creation business.

Interestingly, it will still be possible to make a large fortune in some closely allied business, such as brand creation or jingle writing or video advertising. These are the areas where art finds a direct commercial application. Digital or digitizable art which is sold for its own sake is going to become the province of patronage, performance, and personal creation. There will still be stars, but they won’t be created by a studio system, and they won’t necessarily be rich.

None of this need be bad. But it does mean that our cultural landscape will be quite different from what we are used to.