There was an interesting link posted today on Slashdot regarding a post that Bruce Shneier recently wrote about a law journal article written by John Tehranian on the everyday copyright infringements we are all guilty of in America. If that seems like a lot of links, just focus on reading the last link which is the original PDF article from John Tehranian. It is full of good stuff.

I don't proclaim to be a lawyer, so my qualifications for talking about copyright law come from my long-time fascination and periodic study of copyright law as it pertains to the digital communications made possible by computers and the Internet. I will admit that much of my research has been done via online outlets for information, but I have also researched copyright law in scholarly journals and written materials for one of my college writing courses.

In the article by Mr. Tehranian, many examples are given of how each one of us breaks U.S. copyright laws in one form or another every day when we forward an email, sing a song in our cars, or even when we innocently sing "Happy Birthday" to our friends and loved ones. Did you know that the "Happy Birthday" song was copyrighted, and that any public performance of it (no matter how badly done) is still covered by U.S. copyright law? In fact, any simple Google search for any number of copyrighted materials is likely to bring back results from YouTube videos, online blogs, or even professional publications that have in one way or another broken some form of copyright. Granted, almost all of these "illegal acts" could be considered Fair Use, but the fact remains that it could be potentially litigated if it becomes worth it to the copyright holder, according to Tehranian's arguments.

Politically, providing "copy rights" to a creator of the visual arts, written works, or intellectual property in general is an easy position to take. After all, who wouldn't want to keep others from stealing someone's hard work? But one of the by-products of copyright law that I see in modern America is that it keeps production costs artificially high, and consequently keeps the quality and quantity of products within the domain of copyright laws lower than they might otherwise be if copyright laws did not exist. I have been reading an excellent book called Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Revised and Expanded by Thomas Sowell recently, and his writing about prices basically says that when price controls are put into place, we basically see a general decline in the quality and quantity of the items under the price control because there is less incentive to produce those items for less than the minimum price established for the items in question. Therefore, I say that copyright is a form of price control, and consequently lowers the quality and quantity of copyright-able works in our society.

How can I make such an assertion about copyrighted works? Well, if it is illegal to resell or even distribute in any way mp3 files which are copies of a music CD, and if such rules are heavily litigated, isn't it then easier for the producing entity of the original CD to set the price at which each CD is sold without fears that another secondary entity might come along and produce the same, similar, or derivative version of that CD at a much lower cost to the consumer? I think we can safely assume that yes, this is true given the very aggressive nature of the RIAA lawsuits targeting anyone using P2P software services to distribute, for free, mp3s of various CDs. This extra exposure of the artists technically costs the RIAA member companies like Warner Bros. and Sony exactly $0 in directly identifiable losses. Certainly, there are identifiable losses in margin, losses in total sales, and losses due to production costs associated with producing the albums, but the direct loss of money cannot be equated as a 1:1 loss for every song downloaded because this is what most finance people in business refer to as a "soft loss" or put another way: the money was not spent on the CD but was instead allocated elsewhere by the customer. (possibly to ticket sales for the same artist - which is more lucrative for the artist than for the CD production company)

But copyrights force consumers to pay a minimum price to purchase a CD even when alternative methods for obtaining the same item (a freely download-able mp3 from a P2P software service) are extremely inexpensive or nearly free. Therefore, copyright is no longer fulfilling a useful role in our post-modern, American society. After having realized this fact, I have decided to copyleft this entire site to buck the nasty, non-libertarian bug of copyright laws. You will now notice that there is a Creative Commons license attached to the footer of each page of this site. This includes my photo site.

"But that's artistic content that you could be selling For Fun and Profit!" - you might say. True, but I haven't made a single dime from it yet, and if it is ever so good that people begin "stealing" it from my website then I simply ask that they don't claim it as their own work, but tell others where they found it. Maybe someday my notoriety as a web publisher and photographer will take off, and people will begin paying me to produce content for them rather than taking whatever I throw out onto the Internet for all to enjoy. This is why I have Google Ads on this site at the moment. I can't easily supply all of those links to products or other websites to the readers of this blog, but Google will give me a tiny portion of money for referring others to their site through increased visibility of their services on my site. Hopefully one day others will do the same for my site by linking back to my pictures and written content.

Another reason to make all works on this site "public domain" is that it forces those who would post a comment, photo, or other work on this site to think twice about what they're posting. If they posted something that they wanted to keep as a scarce resource to sell to others, then they obviously wouldn't want to post it here. If they did, then that something immediately becomes a public work that they no longer own exclusive rights to. Or, if the content becomes popular enough, and someone is enterprising enough to determine a way to repackage, market, and sell that content, then they are by all means allowed to do so, as long as they reference where that content came from - this site. This site also then avoids the sticky position of monitoring what content is being posted to it. By the Creative Commons license, all works that now appear on this site are open to use by anyone with Internet access throughout the world, and are never owned by this site. Therefore, if someone posts content which they did not own or did not own the rights to post for the world to see, then that is their responsibility, not this site's responsibility.

So you now understand why I believe that copyright law in the US is badly broken. You may not agree with me, which is fine, but hopefully you understand why a more libertarian viewpoint has some merits in the logic of limiting the amount of price controls and governmental interference when it comes to copyright law.