Boston Globe: Burned? Another article reporting about a bunch of musicians whining and complaining about "not getting paid". Yes, those who create and distribute intellectual property should be paid. No, intellectual property is not the same thing as physical property. For one thing, intellectual property can be very easily duplicated, while physical property cannot. More importantly, intellectual property is a matter of public policy. We as a society decide the laws of IP in a way much different from the laws of physical property. With physical property, the law is more inflexible: if you take my car, you have clearly stolen it. No need for an army of lawyers. For IP, the laws are subject to interpretation, and can vary over time. With IP, there is sufficient fuzziness to allow legions of lawyers to get involved.
At the extreme of IP are patents, which allow one to "own" an idea. If we apply the musicians' simple arguments to the owning of ideas, it actually sounds a little inane: "If you steal my idea, that's no different than stealing my physical property! Stealing is stealing!" I think that stealing a musician's creative musical work is a more tangible instance of stealing than stealing an idea. But neither is as tangible as stealing physical property.
Musicians and record labels have never had total control over their creative works, as a matter of public policy. They are granted limited rights. The law says that a consumer may make a back-up copy of a copyrighted work. The law also says that a comsumer is allowed to timeshift publicly broadcast content. Those are just some instances of the rights that are reserved for consumers.
I keep thinking that somehow consumers and content owners will "meet in the middle" in some kind of compromise. However, as a consumer, I see no signs that the content owners want to meet consumers halfway. They want to grab more rights than they had before, at the expense of the rights of consumers. Consider the legal music subscription services: you have to pay again and again for the same music. Consider that the record labels want controls built into portable music devices so that they can allow the playing of music for a limited number of times, or until a certain cut-off date. Consider that they want to make it a crime to make a back-up copy of a copyrighted work. There are too many examples to list them all here.
I think musicians should be compensated for their work. But there's a big power struggle going on right now, and I hope that we can arrive at a comprise that we can live with.
Posted by Doug Sauder at April 24, 2002 08:48 AM