Copyright's Moral Panics
A moral panic is a type of mob hysteria that generates witch burning and idiotic laws banning paople from access to the Internet. Unless you buy into some serious conspiracy theories about organised religion, at least the witch burners have more basic integrity than the media distribution companies. France has recently made the serious error of trying to save a doomed industry's business model, the UK and New Zealand seem to be teetering on the edge of the same fatal mistake. Cory Doctorow, no friend of copyright maximisers, has just published his response to the UK Mandelson proposal in the Times, we in New Zealand need to be rehearsing these same arguments to get out politicians to listen to New Zealanders, not Sony, Viacom and others desperate to save their outdated businesses.
I can appreciate the fear that politicians have in these current recession-dominated times that further economic decline will occur in such apparently productive sectors as entertainment and services. There are three problems with this however.
Firstly, its never wise to take council of fears. History shows us that doom scenarios and hysteria are always brought out when technology changes the way the world operates. In hindsight, however, we see that the changes have created vast new opportunities for economic growth, social change and consumer benefit.
Secondly, the claims of existing companies about the destructive nature of innovations may well be true - for them. The nature of all innovations is that they disrupt existing complacency. Companies like IBM would never have entered the personal computer space and triggered the wave of developments that resulted in my sitting here today blogging unless innovators like Apple and Microsoft had forced them. The media distribution companies make substantial profits from their existing business models, change might increase it, but it also might decrease those profits and they are unable to take the risk - and that's why we have to ignore their whimpering. No one mourns for the Wang wordprocessor desk as they type on their MacBook.
Finally. much of this is delaying tactics. I'm quite sure that the companies pushing for these laws know full well that the traditional model of moving bits around the world physically is economically, technically and environmentally unsustainable. The problem they face is working out how to pay for the infrastructure they will need and testing the business model so they can keep paying themselves obscene bonuses. The longer they can delay change and continue to amortise their current investments, the more likely they think they will be able to set themselves up to provide the bare necessity of choice to consumers.
Never forget that these are companies that regard the CD as a failure because it gave too much long term value to consumers - these guys want the orgasmic pleasure of a continuous revenue stream for the same old stuff. Just as every video game distributor wants to turn their products into a clone of the World of Warcraft with its vast profits from subscriptions, every media distributor is looking for the way to make us pay similarly for everything else - music, video, books etc. Brian Edwards sounds like an idiot when he says libraries are stealing, but that mindset is not unique and this greedy passion for control and monetisation is really the motivation behind Section 92 and Peter Mandelson. Treasure books and CDs, they may well be the last forms of content you can truely say you owned.