Archives: Expert Predictions

Each of us can now perform widespread copyright infringement without getting caught, if we’re careful. However, none of this will make a hair’s breadth of difference to most of those who wish to sell copyrighted goods in the electronic age because the traditional copyright system is fully Net-capable. We may eventually see a societal move away from information hoarding, but it will not happen because copyright law does not work. There will simply be more money in helping people use information than in metering the stuff out.

The valuable online services of the future will be those that bring order out of the chaos. In some cases, the creators of valuable organizing tools will be able to control them under copyright, and their owners will profit. In many other cases, though, we will see a shift toward information services instead of information hoarding. For instance, it would not be surprising if much of what is sold today as “products” – recorded songs, books, films – become no more than cheap promotional tools for premium services, such as live online concerts and direct interactions between audiences and artists.

Copyright law will continue in its traditional role of promoting markets for copyrighted goods on the Net, as it does in the tangible world. This does not mean, though, that the market will be unchanged. There is a vast movement afoot – the great and rapidly increasing abundance of information on the Net, far more than we can ever use – which may ultimately reduce our tendency to hoard information under the copyright laws. Information loses its value when there is so much we can’t pick apart the useful data from the chaff.

One of the limits on enforcing copyright on the Net is the ease of setting up private, informal exchanges of works between friends. Not black markets exactly, but “friend-to-friend markets.” If one of my friends has a video, song, book, or piece of software that I want, I can easily get it privately through the Net, and the cops won’t be any the wiser. There will be no stopping these personal exchanges online, just as home taping could not be stopped … Can we all get the works we want cheaply or for free among private, interlocking circles of friends? This is a tempting thought, but friend-to-friend markets are far more likely to remain small and self-limiting … A symbolic legal attack every now and then will keep these groups in check.

Net cops can swiftly clean each new infringement out of the major online markets as soon as it appears. They will soon become better at it when copyright owners begin deploying software agents that can roam the entire Net, searching out anonymous infringements. Every time a pirated work is spread to the four corners of the Internet by an anonymous user, software agents will quickly sniff it out. Anonymous infringements will arc across the Net like shooting stars, and disappear from sight just as quickly. Those who want the latest freebie will have to scramble for it before the cops and their software agents go out to sweep up the mess.

On the Net, you don’t need heavy equipment to infringe. Any college kid with a tuition-paid account can readily copy any digital work and send it to thousands of places online for no fee. Add to this the recently developed Net service known as the “anonymous remailer,” and no one will be able to identify that kid as the wrongdoer … The field of potential infringers, once limited to a few well-heeled players, has broadened to everyone with access to computer networks and services – as many as 25 to 50 million Net users worldwide at the moment.

Businesses built on copyrighted products … never depended on stopping all infringements. On city sidewalks and in country flea markets across the nation, you will find truckloads of bootleg music tapes, videos, and software … Infringements galore! … How do these companies stay in business? It’s simple: copyright law succeeds at maintaining public markets for copyrighted products – markets where the owners can charge and receive a price for those products. It is irrelevant whether any given infringement goes unpunished – as long as it is kept outside the public marketplace … If a pirate operation drifts close enough to the surface … the Net cops will infiltrate and bust it before it can make a dent in the copyright owner’s profits.