Copyright and alternatives

This is the week four blog post for the wikiversity OER course. This week we were to analyse a Wikipedia article on copyright law, a 2002 presentation by Lawrence Lessig, and a 2008 article by Bissell and Boyd.

From each of these resources, my questions remain the same (as do my suggested answers, in brackets):

1. Should authors have the right to determine the extent to which their work is copyrighted? (Yes)
2. Should companies have the right to protect the investments they make in their ideas, in order to generate revenue? (Yes)

While I concur with Lessig's examples illustrating "insane rules", we must be careful not to minimise the substantial investments - in terms of both time and dollars - that have shaped culture in the first place. Many millions were invested in Mickey Mouse. The 'theft of common culture' argument is compelling - but it could be countered that generating 'culture' in the form of Mickey Mouse takes investment that ought to be able to generate revenue. Should anyone have the right, now, to devalue that investment? I wonder about the extent to which the past is trying to control the creativity that builds on it. How? I have access to past ideas through libraries and the internet; provided I reference prior ideas correctly and do not attempt to pass off ideas as my own, 'control' seems a loaded word. In our affluent society, awash with public libraries and Internet resources, is anyone truly barred from the creativity of the past?

Yes, there is fuzzy ground around all of this, but I would argue that the Aibo pet example Lessig cites is very different from downloading copyrighted music over the Web, where the artists have agreed to have their copyright transferred to a recording and distribution company in return for monetary compensation. That's right - the artists choose to do this. Recently we have the likes of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails (see "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine...", earlier blog post) who have decided to retain copyright and make their music available on their own terms - but, as I point out in that post, to what extent have they already benefited from the fame and exposure given them by their previous agencies?

From the Wikipedia article I was intrigued by the statement, "The genesis of copyright can be seen as a process through which capitalist societies found a way to wed the printing press and the marketplace". This sounds somewhat selfish, though the later statement "creating marketplace incentives for the production of works" adds the balance. It is that word - incentive - that needs to be injected into any debate on copyright and its alternatives. I read the book Affluenza last week; the book would not have been able to have been written were it not for a publisher's advance, and subsequently the publisher's potential to regain and profit from their investment. If we are going to be honest about copyright, we also need to be honest about the fact that content generation is hard work. If we value that work, we should reimburse those who make it possible and to those who add value to its distribution along the way.

So, is the insistence of royalties unjust? If not, how much is too much? In true capitalist tradition, the answer could be 'let the market decide'. If I enjoy the creativity of someone else, I ought to somehow reimburse. Money is a means of exchange of value... I'm all for initiatives such as those outlined here and the proposed Canadian system.

My conclusion: If people want to contribute to OER, good on them. They should be applauded. However I do not think that authors or institutions who choose to retain copyright should be rubbished. Their ideas are not necessarily unavailable or inaccessible; rather, they are exercising their right to protect the investment they have made and to limit the potential for others to financially benefit from their investment. I think that tertiary institutions should also give careful thought to adopting a Creative Commons license, which provides for all sorts of permutations... we have discussed CCLs here at BCNZ (November last year in fact), and will revisit it in a few years once we have concluded some of our strategic changes.