Fire Alarms Systems

The development of technology has to avoid the relaxation of copyright

Go after copyright reformer is risky. To digital zealots, the defense is copyrighted as a return favor in the typewriter. (I personally like typewriters, I own several, and I recommend a wonderful 1997 Atlantic piece on them Longform.org). Go after copyright sworn enemies is what does Robert Levine in his recently published book Free Ride: How the Internet is destroying the culture and business culture as the business can Fight Back .

The pitch: conspiracy to promote digital corporate ideology-free that has been plaguing the Internet in the past decade. With its huge financial firepower that Google and the apples and the Silicon Valley venture capital firms that financed Napster has everything to undermine the concept of copyright has to. Advocates to lobby the U.S. Congress to finance free-culture, they created a wave of rip-and-burn products that would sell their MP3 devices. You have legislators and experts in order to pave the way for a general plunder of intellectual property - from music to journalism content. According to Levine, he makes his point with possible solutions to restore the value of creativity (we 'll this in a future article) address.

Needless to say, Robert Levine has produced a politically incorrect opus . And that 's what makes his book fascinating.

To begin, reinterpretations of the author's famous quote: ". Information wants to be free" Free Ride reminiscent of the complete set as far more differentiated. That really is what tech writer Stewart Brand said in a 1984, a hacker conference, "On the one hand information wants to be expensive because it \ so valuable 's change exactly the right information at the right place to make your life on .. the other side, information wants to be free because the cost of getting it deeper and deeper all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. "

Few citations in recent history have been distorted and misinterpreted more than this. All jumped on Stewart Brand 's distinction between Gathering information and to make available to the audience. While costs remain high for the former - at least for the producers of original content or information - the marginal cost of broadcasting fell dramatically, and that's what sparked the idea of ??a zero-cost culture. But "media products have never been priced according to its marginal cost," says Levine, is free and therefore an idea that 's difficult to defend.

As described in Free Ride , U.S. lawmakers played a crucial role in opening up the floodgates of piracy and copyright infringement on the Internet. On 28 October 1998 Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The law says Levine, was a "safe haven" for Internet service providers and some online companies. No longer liable for copyright infringement on the actions of users based, writes Levine, that the "safe harbor it easier for sites like YouTube to make a valuable forum for amateur creativity become. But neither can they didn they build great companies from the professional content 't pay. "This, he says, is how Congress created YouTube. (Google bought it in 2006 for $ 1.65 billion).

The book's most spectacular deconstruction involves Lawrence Lessig . The Harvard law professor is one of the fiercest opponents of tough copyright laws. For years, he 's already criss-crossed the world well-made and deliver compelling presentations on the need to revise the copyright law. When Viacom sued YouTube in 2007 for copyright infringement, seeking more than one billion dollars in damages, accused of trying Lessig Viacom, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act be repealed. It was a de facto Google's defense of Lessig, who was then as director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. What Lessig is not known that two weeks after concluding a deal to acquire YouTube, Google, a $ 2m donation to the Stanford Center, and a year later gave another $ 1.5 million to Creative Commons, Lessig 's most famous intellectual Baby . To be fair, Levine said to me, he didn 't believe Lessig' s positions on copyright have been influenced by the grants from Google. In addition, Google set aside $ 100m to fight Viacom lawsuit. Numerous examples in the Free Ride show how technology companies are obliged to influence public policy. Ironically, Lawrence Lessig 's newest crusade at Harvard about the corruption in Washington.

Robert Levine 's book may be challenged on a few items.

. One, it 's too easy for the music industry. (. Is his view of his position as editor in chief of Billboard magazine, where he witnessed his first-hand the self-inflicted damage to the music industry has been affected), the music business, missed all the trains: (a) the physical model defended up until the last minute even when its destruction seemed inevitable, (b) extended it until it could double the screwing of consumers and artists alike (unfortunately bad analog artists have been replaced by bad digital).

. Two, he tends to forget the overall satisfaction of content creators against all forms of digital looting. '(S Rope Series I \ - - approve of the short-term appeal of the eyeball count blind victims of all types of aggregators my Lenin \) ve often been described in the Monday demonstrations Note how publishers. "

. Three has unleashed the advent of free content, in fact talent. Unknown authors have succeeded, thanks to rise from the darkness to direct access to the public. And some alternative ways to make money (more in another future column) found.

Finally made the development of technology to prevent the relaxation of copyright. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act may have accelerated the transition, but it didn 't cause upheaval. Today, bittorrent file transfer of music and films accounts for about 10-12% of Internet bandwidth consumption and YouTube accounts for 11%. Pirated content represents almost 100% of the former and about a third of the latter. A large number, yes, and huge losses for the music and film industries. But Netflix's legitimate content now accounts for 30% of all Internet traffic (Hulu has less than 2%) and iTunes is growing faster than ever. And some economists consider that the task of a large volume of content for free is the price paid to a marketable and must be Released.

The music industry pays a terrible price during the digital transition with a decrease of 50% of its sales in a decade. But it would be unfair to make too lenient towards legislators and Internet pirates, the main culprit. Unbundling played a crucial role as well, just like in the newspaper industry. The ability to buy a single song on iTunes (instead of an album), or hope that a single article on a website is enough audience for themselves (instead of, or the purchase of an entire bundled newspapers) pay a lot of damage caused to generate.

As troubled as it is by piracy, the film industry is immune to the concept of unbundling, which partly explains why box office 2006-2010 increased by 30% outside the United States and by 15% in the USA / Canada market. Although the number of admissions is slipping, the industry has been able to find its way into the digital world.

Robert Levine 's book is a must-read that reframes the debate on the evolution of copyright. In an unusual way, it encompasses a European view on the issue (Levine lives part-time in Berlin). That makes the book even more interesting as countries explore ways for content creators to finance their work while not killing the formidable creative freedom unleashed by the digital world.

frederic.filloux @ mondaynote.com