from the copyright-as-a-crutch dept
A few folks have been submitting stories to us about CBS and Viacom chair Sumner Redstone's comments about copyright, claiming that "If content is king, copyright is its castle." It has a nice ring to it, but by itself it's fairly meaningless. His specific statements on copyright, however, suggest he's been sucked in by the copyright myth. "Think about it: You cannot pay the rent posting videos on YouTube," he said. And, indeed, you cannot... if all you're doing is posting videos to YouTube. However, I could just as easily say: "Think about it: You cannot pay the rent putting the Daily Show on TV." Because you can't... unless you sell ads with it. Which is exactly what Viacom does. And there's nothing stopping people from putting business models around slapping videos up on YouTube as well -- it's just that those business models may be different than the ones Viacom is used to.
He then says: "You cannot make it as a musician, you can't make it as a filmmaker or a writer without ... effective and enforced copyright legislation." This is, to put it flatly, wrong. You absolutely can make it as any one of those things without effective and enforced copyright. We're seeing plenty of musicians do exactly that. We've seen writers do the same as well. And despite the cries of the MPAA, we've seen that movies still make tons of money, even when they're widely downloaded (meaning that copyrights were neither effective nor enforced for many). That's in the present day. He's also wrong historically, as anyone familiar with the history of copyright will know. Plenty of creative works were created prior to copyright being around, and weak copyright laws actually helped accelerate the market for books in the US.
His next statement is even worse: "The time and effort spent creating and the months spent producing, marketing and distributing content is an investment; it is not intended to be a donation." The thing is no one has ever said it's intended to be a donation. All we've said is that you can put different business models around it that don't involve treating people like criminals, giving them more content and even being able to make more money from that content, if you do it right. The idea that people who are pushing back on draconian and damaging copyright laws want all content to be "donated" is incorrect. We're saying that it's time to find and adopt new business models that don't involve artificial scarcity. It's really not that hard, except for those who still believe the copyright fairy tales that Redstone repeats here.
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