Copyright

I have been contemplating copyright for some time.

It seems to me that the original copyright laws were enacted in such a way because the policing of the medium (say books) was entirely possible. The medium was the content, but no more.

Enter the Internet and all the assumptions behind policing and control have gone to pot.

The ‘business model’ for the internet is primarily advertising – and the related data analytics model which is also for marketing purposes.

The idea of charging for content is being pursued by many groups on the internet but I think it will struggle because people will naturally gravitate to free content even if it is of lower quality.

That is, on the internet the purpose of content is to attract eyeballs in order to drives sales and marketing opportunities for products and services.

And hence I think that copyright as a concept should be restructured around this emerging reality.

What does this mean in reality? Well, the guys that are profiting from sales and marketing should share some of their profits with ALL content providers, be they books, movies, blogs, tweets, whatever.

This would work in much the same way as the recording industry has forever charged for the public use of music.

A cafe, for example, is charged a small fee for the use of music and that money is then distributed to musicians or the owners of the recording on some basis of fairness (based on frequency of playing). Note that the cafe makes it’s money by selling food and beverages and not by selling music. The music is just part of the many ways in which a cafe attracts customers.

In a similar way content is just one of the ways by which online advertisers and marketers attract eyeballs.

I can see a national or even global content distribution model where a fraction of the money made through the internet by advertisers and marketers is distributed to content owners on a basis that is related to the ‘eyeball traction’ of each and every unit of content. On the Internet this is quite easy to measure.