Intellectual Property

Here are some thoughts on the recent proposed legislation for the protection of digital content:
The television, movie and music industry, especially those who are focused on mass marketing have received a great deal of regulatory aid in defending their businesses against new business models and changing technology. Examples include the repeated extension of the length of copyrights, as well as the provisions in the DMCA which effectively make accused violators of copyright guilty until proven guilty.

In exchange for this protection, I believe they have done very little to compensate the public for these regulatory changes which have directly benefited them. I would challenge them to show that they have increased the quantity of intellectual property they have produced in proportion to the extension in length of copyright. I understand that copyright as a method of protecting intellectual property was originally included in the constitution in order to encourage the advancement of the arts and sciences. 

Past and future enlargements of intellectual property rights should be tied to a public benefit in terms of increased availability of intellectual property. An example of such an exchange of benefits might be to have copyrights expire at the point the copyrighted work has been unavailable from the copyright holder for 3 consecutive years or for 20 years total. The definition of available would clearly be problematic, but clearly this would give an equitable exchange.

Similarly, given current efforts by these industries to mandate intrusive protections for their digital content, some sort of exchange of good should be included. An example might be a requirement that any content protected by a required scheme must be made available in that format for the length of the copyright. Perhaps there should be a requirement that an unprotected version be kept in escrow by some third party. This version could be released to the public either at the expiration of copyright or under specific fair use circumstances.

Finally, one of the major arguments in favor of some recently introduced legislation is that new protection is needed in order to create enough content to make broadband internet access more popular. None of the plans for digital content from proponents of this legislation appear to be anything other than turning the internet into cable TV. Cable TV already exists. It does not need to be recreated on the Internet. If the 3 Billion documents that already exist on the Internet are not enough content, then I question why the government has an interest in forcing dramatic changes to all computers in order to increase Internet usage.