One more critical virtue of copyright property: without it, one has no bargaining power with which to extract a decent sum to permit third party uses. Mess that "right" of authors up, and you blow away all (financial) incentive to create. So, do not mess with copyright. Copyright is much wiser than some among the digerati think.
What most miss (apart from talent professionals and professional licensors, who tend to avoid these debates) is that the aggregation model of corporations does not work very well in the licensing arena. The large corporate structure in entertainment is, I posit, in the process of evolving to a flatter hierarchy, more individually based world. Big corporations are an artifact of their monopoly of the presses (and the studios) in the old physical world. Entertainment licensing is inherently creative, personal, and discretionary. It is best done, not by corporate drones in back rooms, but by the artist him or herself using a professional licensing agent/lawyer, who works on limited commission -- and acts under principles of strict fiduciary duty to that artist. The outsize commissions that publishers award themselves to license "for" artists, in no way incentivizes successful exploitation. In fact, it incentivizes the opposite -- passive rentseeking.
A copyright is simply property. Property is a good thing. Society can't function without decent respect for property. A copyright is also a very limited thing--just the right to sue (for an accounting of all the gains of the infringement, within three years--an extremely tight statute of limitations). Few authors choose to sue--the vast majority of individual copyright infringement claims are small matters people generally have no desire to waste time or money fighting about. An author's exclusive right to profit from his property is NOT the problem. The problem today is the persistence of rent-seeking corporate copyright aggregators, whose threshhold for suit is lower because of that aggregation. But, aggregate copyright control no longer makes economic sense.
Authors consider the occasional use by others, mostly, just to be good advertising and to their greater fame and glory. They will rarely sue -- and only when clearly ripped off. The new digital publishing reality -- "publishers" no longer controlling access to publication -- means that authors will begin to retain more control over their rights, including their rights to sue. Broad rights assignments to corporate entities should wane in future. They should become limited use licenses. Not sweeping rights assignments as in the past.
So, tendentious infringement suits are a threat that should be self-cancelling, as the digital world rewrites its contracts to suit the digital world better, rather than imposing the old forms of the print world.
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Copyright is creators' source of bargaining power
One more critical virtue of copyright property: without it, one has no bargaining power with which to extract a decent sum to permit third party uses. Mess that "right" of authors up, and you blow away all (financial) incentive to create. So, do not mess with copyright. Copyright is much wiser than some among the digerati think.
What most miss (apart from talent professionals and professional licensors, who tend to avoid these debates) is that the aggregation model of corporations does not work very well in the licensing arena. The large corporate structure in entertainment is, I posit, in the process of evolving to a flatter hierarchy, more individually based world. Big corporations are an artifact of their monopoly of the presses (and the studios) in the old physical world. Entertainment licensing is inherently creative, personal, and discretionary. It is best done, not by corporate drones in back rooms, but by the artist him or herself using a professional licensing agent/lawyer, who works on limited commission -- and acts under principles of strict fiduciary duty to that artist. The outsize commissions that publishers award themselves to license "for" artists, in no way incentivizes successful exploitation. In fact, it incentivizes the opposite -- passive rentseeking.
Copyright is a right to sue. Not the obligation to.
A copyright is simply property. Property is a good thing. Society can't function without decent respect for property. A copyright is also a very limited thing--just the right to sue (for an accounting of all the gains of the infringement, within three years--an extremely tight statute of limitations). Few authors choose to sue--the vast majority of individual copyright infringement claims are small matters people generally have no desire to waste time or money fighting about. An author's exclusive right to profit from his property is NOT the problem. The problem today is the persistence of rent-seeking corporate copyright aggregators, whose threshhold for suit is lower because of that aggregation. But, aggregate copyright control no longer makes economic sense.
Authors consider the occasional use by others, mostly, just to be good advertising and to their greater fame and glory. They will rarely sue -- and only when clearly ripped off. The new digital publishing reality -- "publishers" no longer controlling access to publication -- means that authors will begin to retain more control over their rights, including their rights to sue. Broad rights assignments to corporate entities should wane in future. They should become limited use licenses. Not sweeping rights assignments as in the past.
So, tendentious infringement suits are a threat that should be self-cancelling, as the digital world rewrites its contracts to suit the digital world better, rather than imposing the old forms of the print world.