In this thread we ponder the realities of intellectual property by contrasting it with a future that is awesome.
The predicate goes like this: when you hear a song, you can remember it. In fact a lot of the time you can almost but not quite imagine you're hearing the whole song over again, but it's just not the same as actually listening to it.
Presumably - since it would be awesome - in the future someone could invent a bioengineering solution which would allow us to have active recall of listening to music - some way to rewire the neurons so the data was stored accurately and could be recalled by stimulating your auditory senses in a direct way.
This would all be internal and biological - essentially an enhanced body function.
Where does modern copyright law fit in this future?
Hearing a song on say, HD radio, you would never feel compelled to buy it since you'd be able to recall an extremely accurate and sensational memory of it at will. Would it be considered copyright infringement to do so? Would we dream to try and enforce it? What model can IP have in such a world, and by extension, does the modern model of IP even make sense since our technology lets us do, essentially the same thing.
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Unless the movie is truly dreadful in which case the memory erasure process will take place while you're actually watching the film.
Although total recall glands probably present much more important problems than "what happens to pop music?"
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I don't think we even need to look that far ahead before our conceptions of IP really stop making sense.
Afterall, it's only going to be a few short years until we can fit every book written over the entirety of human history and a few decades to come on a regular sized hard disk, let alone a nail sized Micro-SD card. Massively larger storage solutions are currently possible (and prototypes created which can theoretically improved upo many fold).
Shortly after that, it will be possible to store every piece of music ever recorded on something the same size.
At a point during the advance of technology it will translate from we have the ability to have every piece of music ever to it is expected that we have every piece of music ever. At this point it will become impossible to purchase every piece individually, whether it's at 1 dollar or 10 for a dollar. Reasonable price will have to drastically drop or piracy will be ever more attractive.
We're already seeing the ideas of IP failing to keep up with the advance of storage technology. In Canda there's a charge per megabyte for blank media that was instituted for optical media to reimburse the recording industry for piracy, as it stands you're paying more for a CD in tax than you do for the actual CDs. While I don't believe that they also do the same for DVDs, Blu-Ray Discs, memory cards or hard drives but they quickly reveal themselves not to scale at all. Sure, we can set a price and we can change it in the future, but we're never going to be able to set an enduring price that will remain reasonable.
This is unlikely to be true. What will happen is that the music industry will be forced even further away from the sale of shiny-discs (or even digital tracks) as their primary source of income.
Let us not forget that the actual manufacturing cost of a blank disk is literally pennies.
IP is no longer a sustainable measure of production. We're instituting a market-framework on arts and products that, in many cases, no longer have intrinsic economic value, per se.
I honestly believe that the "future of IP dissemination" is in the subscription model. You play a flat monthly free for access to a large catalog. Market competition comes not from individual pieces of product, but from the entirely of one's available library. We're already seeing this with services like Netflix, who have been immensely successful. Even Hulu exists on this model, substituting subscription for advertising.
"Art must be free" and all that jazz is a separate argument, but the implications of the dying profitable market for music, television etc. instill the belief that we're doing it wrong.
In short, people like Metallica will no longer be able to collect money for a song they played in a recording studio 20 years ago. To collect money, they will actually have to play the damn song again in front of people.
It was created as a means to protect the work of inventors and artists, in order to encourage them to come up with new ideas. The ease of copying the material was immaterial. I think the change in technology just means we need to educate people on what ip IS, and why it's a good thing that artists actually get paid for their work.
Thus the basis of the thread - it's an experiment in how innate the ability has to be before people start wondering why someone could hold license to it. I was motivated by the XM radio thing where the recordings are basically high quality MP3s of music.
Like I said - how do you define that when it's essentially my own memory you're telling me I don't own.
And yes in this future I do imagine the primary money spinning would come from the concert experience, but I imagine earning money would be tricky since you'd have to keep changing it up to keep people coming.
You could also get a band together and play the music, or sing the music. These questions have not gone unasked by IP economists
And I think the awesome future is going to be a world in particular very different from the "real world" that the concept of physical property developed around.
Physical property is based on scarcity. It's important that society recognizes something as "yours" because maybe there's only one of it and it wouldn't be fair if others could just take it. But in the digital world this is just nonsense; if I put a song on a website or a book on a website it's not "yours" because it could be anyone's; there's no scarcity. At most, your "property" is simply just your access to the thing in question.
I am hoping the awesome future and the digital otherland will basically be a communist paradise where the concept of individual property evaporates.
But this is again nonsense. It would mean that competition is theft.
First mover advantage?
Sale of complementary goods?
For now, when we limit ourselves to discuss e.g. music, it's no big deal. The production cost are relatively low and the artists usually give up comparatively limited opportunities in the job market. But who will produce the next "Avatar," if it can be instantly copied?
Or looking even further ahead: who will design the next Accord, if I can just download one from The Pirate Bay and print it out on my nano assembler?
Perhaps more realistically, and I'm seriously hoping for this, the nature of consumerism will shift to something more like how patrons paid artists, or how foundations fund universities. Radiohead tried this with In Rainbows—pay what you think it's worth. I believe there are some webcomics that subsist on donations (and probably physical merch).
If an author releases a book for free, you read it, you like it, and you want to read more ... then hopefully in the awesome future you as a consumer will know that you should pay/donate him money so he can quit his day job and get busy writing the sequel for you to enjoy.
1) If we really have nano-assemblers and such, or any technology that meets all fundamental wants and needs, then we'd likely have to be in some sort of communist or other a-capitalist system of government anyway.
2) It's not that we have to abandon IP altogether, we just have to take some serious notice of how far we're going to send our courts in order to enforce some idealized impractical notion of it.
People tend to forget this. It's one reason why extending copyright 70-90 years after publication makes no sense.
I want another Paul's Boutique.
Also, abolishing IP altogether(or at least a much needed reform which cuts the time frame on copyright duration significantly) would push "artist" closer to a profession and not a lifestyle, but it certainly won't abolish the economic viability of artistic creations.
Both won't be happening in a Western country.
You guys realize that music existed long before methods of recording it did, right? The death of the recording industry, which is inevitable, does not imply the death of music itself. We won't buy songs or albums anymore, but we'll still pay suicidal Norwegians to play black metal to crowds of pagans in front of a burning church.
Or, uh, I will, anyway.
IP doesn't apply to just art, and in a lot of areas the design and implementation work is 99% of the expense. As much as I hate the pharmaceutical industry, its a decent example- drugs often cost jack and shit to make. Designing and testing them, on the other hand, could bankrupt small nations. How do you deal with that sort of thing?
EDIT: Oh, and dropping back to art: Music- not all musicians are performers. Some are just song writers. Some simply prefer to do recordings only. How is that handled?
Also movies. You can't exactly do live performance here. :P
Eric Bauman says hi.
Um, I'm not sure what your point is?
We are obviously still in a scarcity based economy, one that EBaum apparently and unscrupulously capitlized on...
Though the focus on albums (among pirates and otherwise) might be a symptom of the capitalist recording industry, for all I know.
Because you need to have a non-arbitrary line you draw when you decide why something's supposed to be illegal/wrong and why it needs to be regulated/controlled in a certain way. The crux of it is that as we evolve as a society both culturally and technologically the ability to be able to do something does and definitely should weigh heavily on whether something is wrong or illegal.
Key example, eating pork. In ancient times making eating pork illegal made sense because it was impossible or nearly impossible to cook it properly and the eating of pork commonly spread parasites and other nasty things. As technology evolved, cooking pork properly became possible, then became easy. At a certain point the cost of making pork illegal becomes greater than the cost of just making sure people cook it properly; hence why you can eat pork now anywhere sane.
In the case of this brain computer scenario it poses a heavy question about whether or not the costs and benefits of enforcing IP are still worth it. Once you get into the territory of people being able to, via an easy biological function, modify their own body so that perfect storage and reproduction of most senses becomes ubiquitous then you face a significant increase in costs. It's now much much harder to enforce restrictions because people can easily modify their own bodies, because it's easy the culture tends not to value the experience like they once did, further increasing a trend towards piracy.
So you have to ask yourself. Is securing a limited monopoly on an idea (copyright is a privilege granted by government, not a right) producing enough results culturally through the increased production of art and science to justify the costs that enforcing these same laws incurs? If it doesn't, then the law needs to change, no matter how much some people love their Michael Bay special effects extravaganzas or their heavily doctored top fifty pop albums, the law reflects the attitudes and trends of society as a whole for the greatest net benefit to the greatest majority of its members as is possible.
Edit:
Also, to get a bit more on topic. In this awesome future where sensory reproduction is common place I imagine that massive leaps in creativity software have also occurred, making it easier than ever for even the non-artistic to create new experiences and content for others that looks and feels just as professional as big budget content, and in much less time. So the inevitable decline of big content would be supplemented with an exponential rise in professional yet independent content put forth by an army of Hobbyists empowered with new technology.
This time we got to page 2 before I quote one of my favorite IP documents:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm
Chapter 9 looks into the pharmaceutical industry in detail.
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf
It's not self evident that removing IP alone while not mandating price controls would have a negative effect.
Concept albums I am more inclined to want the whole album. "Don't you forget about me," on the other hand, I can do without the rest of the Breakfast Club soundtrack. And some bands make albums where all the songs sound basically the same except for a few standout songs.
I think the point still stands. In your hypothetical economy, people would still steal ideas. Not for profit this time, but to claim them as their own to get the fame without the work. This already happens, I can't see it happening any less in that sort of economy.
So in post-scarcity, some of that stuff won't matter. I do agree that plagiarism is potentially a problem in an "idea economy." If I write a book that seems like it could be popular, what would prevent someone else from copying and pasting and rebranding themselves as the author and distributing it themselves? I'm not sure; I don't know how often this even happens, or would happen.
I also wonder to what extent content creators even ought to care about getting "credit," as opposed to spreading the content/idea itself. I mean, who here today knows the creator of the lolcats meme, or All Your Base? Someone thought of that shit first; and nobody even cares who it is. And I wonder if this is perhaps a good thing. Perhaps authors and content creators should be more invisible instead of basking in the fame spotlight, putting the spotlight on their creations.
As for your last paragraph, you're basically saying creators should do all the work and get none of the credit. And not want any. Human nature being what it is I don't think that makes much sense.
Basically, the Beastie Boys have to give Curtis Mayfield some cash if they sold a copy of 'Egg Man.'
Anywho, dealing with the topic in more realistic terms, I like what a previous poster said about donations. It would ultimately give more choices to the fans, they would be determining content instead of middle men like the music or movie industry. It would be so cool to have shows continue for as long as the fans wanted, not the projection of entertainment execs potential profits.