Copyright creeps
We have stated before that one of the trends of the last twenty years has been a frantic cycle of copyright extension. The major media companies have formed oligopolies and try to extend copyright protecting their materials. Technology is moving faster, so that the regulations are sidestepped and digital sharing grows. The content oligopolies then propose (and often get) ever more stringent laws, which create more resentment and even more copyright avoidance.
Once oligopolies in movie, TV, books, and music had managed to eliminate most of the competition, they thought that their income as toll keepers would be uninterrupted. Gigantic hoards of copyright materials, including film libraries and music libraries, have been marshaled by multinational giants. But in spite of their best efforts in shaping national and international law, that stream has, in some cases, slowed down to a trickle.
An excellent article by Rasmus Fleischer ("The Future of Copyright", 6/0/08) captures the paradox:
Contrast today's world with the golden age of copyright, roughly speaking between 1800 and 1950. Back then, enforcement was easy. The act of reading a book was far removed from the act of printing one. Record presses and gramophones were safely distinct machines." Burt standing with tape recorders and moving on the Internet, the difference between producing a film or book and consuming it has gotten blurred.
And the reaction has been a frantic pace of expanding copyrights, as Flesicher points out. "Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses."
More an more the content oligopolies want to have Internet service providers, search engines, and software companies, to take on the responsibility for the actions of their users, to spy on their customers, and be fines if they refuse. The prospect is chilling: a true Big Brother watching over each person's every keystroke, and taxing us for even mentioning or criticizing a company's copyrighted products.
The copyright oligopoly's real desire is to create an international police state dedicated to the protection of their rights. That's the purpose of ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), currently being negotiated very quietly by the leading industrial nations.
As Fleishcer writes,
The proposed ACTA treaty would create international legislation turning border guards into copyright police, charged with checking laptops, iPods, and other devices for possibly infringing content, and given the authority to confiscate and destroy equipment without even requiring a complaint from a rights-holder.
It's a horrific scenario. I'm not always a fan of the libertarian Cato Institute, but on this issue they are dead on.
