Dead mens money (Or : Why I feel copyright should change)

So the idea of copyright is that if someone creates an idea that can be expressed in a form of media (speech, song, book, etc) then it will be protected by law, giving them a monopoly on it and allows them to make as much of a profit as possible.

It’s a fantastic idea in theory as I’m sure that each and every one of us would want to make as much of a profit as possible for our work.

However there are a few problems that I personally have with the system, which spread over the duration of protection, corporate control and ownership and methods of enforcing protection.

Firstly my biggest concern is the duration of protection that is afforded to the creator of works, which at the moment lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years. This effectively puts a stranglehold on an idea or a concept for about three generations, placing it inside a protective bubble from which the world can view it, but never interact with it on their terms.

This may seem like a bit of an extreme way to state the obvious here but it should probably be mentioned anyway. The average lifespan of aperson in Australia is 81.5 years which means that if a work is created and you were over the age of 12, you statistically speaking will be dead before you can do anything with the work. That’s assuming the author died today as well. If the author was at age 20 when they made the work and lived to the average lifespan not only will you be dead, but your children will also be dead and your children’s children won’t be looking long for this world either. It effectively seals ideas away from the hands of at least one generation, with potentially up to four being affected.

I don’t know about you but to me that seems like madness. Sure, people want to protect their work but a three generation embargo on certain ideas is a touch excessive. After all you won’t be around for the last 70 years so who is actually profiting off of the content?

This leads me to the next issue that I had with copyright, who actually gets control over the work. I used to work in a fairly large company, which had some interesting terms in the contract I signed. One of the big things included was that any intellectual property that I created while at my place of work was the property of my employer. This was because we dealt in information and often there were better ways to perform certain tasks, such as programming a search of a system or so forth. All self explanatory really, as the systems between competitors were often similar and my employer didn’t want me to sell off anything that’d give the competitors an advantage.

However the contract wasn’t worded to specifically include the work that related to systems, nor was it only for work done in the office so there was potential for any idea I created at home on a weekend to end up as their IP, which could prevent me from working on it until I die plus 70 years.

I imagine the contracts are slightly worse in intellectual property generating industries such as the music industry or publishing industry but the idea remains much the same – Although they have free reign in the creation of an idea they are unable to edit it without permission from their employers. As mentioned before, this system is in place until the day the creators die, plus 70 years making it impossible for them to work with their ideas.

Lastly is the process of enforcement of the protection of copyright.

In gaming this is a ‘Big Thing’ under the title of DRM (digital restrictions rights management). It is often a process of not trusting people to do the right thing when it comes to purchasing games and instead put restrictions on the media that causes it to monitor what you are doing. The more benign form of DRM is that it just puts a copy restriction on the disc, preventing it from being copied. The more malignant form is where they create entire programs that scan your computer for any program that has a connection with software piracy, after which it prevents you from playing the game. There are more forms of DRM and it works across most media industries but it equates to the same thing.

Controlling how you use your media after you have paid for it.

Now we can go back once again to my favourite hypothetical example.

I’ve mentioned before that copyright lasts 70 years after the creators death,  and that the creator can actually lose access to copyright by working for a company. The idea of the above DRM added to it means that if a content creator is fired from a media production agency they can now be forced to pay to access their idea, and also be under constant surveillance while viewing it. Worse still is that this is 100% legal and will enforce this to the day of the creators death.

Thinking in terms of the amount of people that are restricted access for the 70+ years after content is generated I find it difficult to agree with the concept of copyright as it stands. Any idea that relates to after the death of the content creator is far too restrictive as it can easily prevent a generation from accessing an idea. I’m not sure what system best preserves the interest of everyone after this point, but all I can say with certainty is that the system needs to change to provide more access to everyone.