From The Times
December 28, 2007
’Tis the season for respecting copyright, fa la la ...

Cast an eye over the family stash of Christmas presents and the odds are that there will be more than a few books, CDs and films dotted around the room. Given how much Britons spend on entertainment in the run-up to the festive season, it can be argued that Christmas, the time of giving, of receiving and of cruelty to turkeys, is also the time when people most respect copyright, simply by buying so much creative intellectual property.

Not that most of us think like that when buying Mothership by Led Zeppelin, or another unused cookery book - even if, when it comes to copyright, the subject is never far from the minds of entertainment companies (they have lawyers and lobbyists to amuse) and sometimes occurs to politicans, too. But do the rest of us benefit?

Here is a thought experiment worth considering the next time that there is ill-considered talk about tightening copyright law. Battered and not properly loved, the public library is an outrageous attempt to encourage its infringement. These are taxpayer-funded institutions that buy books in large numbers and encourage people to share them, thereby denying repeat sales to book publishers who are fighting to deliver growth in a market that can be described as mature.
Not outraged yet? Think of this: remember that libraries were set up using the technologies of the time. What would Andrew Carnegie, the Lakshmi Mittal of his day, do if he was around today? Well, he would probably buy a football club, but setting that aside, if he applied the thinking of the Carnegie libary programme to modern circumstances, he might have tried to set up a library of the goods that people value today - that’s music and films, as well as books – and would have used modern technology to share the knowledge. Carnegie surely would have wanted to use downloads to allow people to share entertainment of all sorts in a way that would prompt howls of complaint from the modern copyright lobby.

Anyway, in the real 21st century, despite the attractions of the scenario just outlined, libraries do exist. Most have music and DVDs, too, but the real point is that, despite the existence of the lending library up the road, the books industry still exists and is in pretty healthy shape, even if it is not growing much. You don’t often hear about the damage that public borrowing is doing, or, indeed, the impact of digital on the literary market.
Survey the collection of books in the lounge, mostly half-read or read once and now forgotten, it would seem that publishers are doing quite alright, thank you. It is, of course, possible to read a book on a computer screen – it can be scanned in easily enough, or even typed in – but somehow the packaging and the paper make it compelling, which is partly why so many people read the last Harry Potter in hardback, rather than wait until it was available for free online. And don’t forget that most decent literature is out of copyright in any case – and yet still people like Penguin Classics’ latest design with the black covers.

If this were the music or film business, the state of affairs would be a crisis. Libraries freely giving away books; no encryption technology to prevent online copying; readers routinely lending their favourites to their friends; and the literary equivalents of Mickey Mouse and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are already out of copyright anyway.
All of which suggests that it is too easy to worry about tightening up copyright rules, forgetting that large media companies already have ingrained advantages, whether in marketing, packaging or the experience. It’s more fun to go for a date in the cinema, rather than sit at home and watch a pirate video.

Should you really like this article, it can be found in full online, and copied and pasted and sent to any number of people via the internet. Remarkably, perhaps, this risk has yet to disrupt sales of The Times (even if you give the whole thing away online, daily sales of all newspapers decline only gently). Yet, more to the point, nobody is calling for Microsoft to ban or criminalise vigorous use of Control-C and Control-V; nor is anybody demanding that scanner manufacturers pay a tax on sales to help fund bursaries for up-and-coming writers and journalists.
Now, consider the latest straws in the wind on the subject of copyright enforcement. Spend too much time doing illegal downloading? Bad boy – we’ll cut the internet off. That’ll do it. Well, only until the serial downloader finds somebody else’s account to use. Enforcing it will be interesting, though: that could require a lot more monitoring of personal use of the internet, compelling in a democracy; and, given that the Government has just lost 25 million sets of bank details, what’s to say that internet providers’ storage of surfing records will be better. Do something worse, such as camcording the latest blockbuster while it is still playing in the cinema, and perhaps a jail sentence should follow. Never mind that the prisons are overcrowded and that there are civil penalties in place.

Yes, music is having a tough time, but some of that is to do with the fact that for years consumers had a poor product – the album with loads of filler tracks – foisted on them rather than the songs they wanted. Isn’t the real challenge for film dealing with a national desire for locally produced movies, rather than battling the pirates with more draconian rules.
After all, it’s obvious how music and film companies – and stars – gain from suppressing piracy. For consumers who are used to swapping CDs and DVDs as well as books, new rules seem excessive. Copyright has always been a bargain between the rights of creators and consumers: corporates and politicans wanting to tighten the law to save supposedly stricken industries ought to look at publishing to see that today’s problem may not be so severe after all.