A couple of years back, I remember one of our American Creative Directors being aghast at my defending the pirated books sold on our streets. My point was (and is) that trying to curb piracy by cracking down on the peddlers and printers is simply not practical – and more importantly goes against the grain of free business.
Firstly, the principle of copyrights itself is a recent phenomena ushered in by agents and publishers. Neither Mozart not Shakespeare copyrighted their works. And for a good reason; there is an argument that the more a piece of work gets transmitted to more people, the greater the respect for the author which in turn leads to more lucrative assignments. This argument gets even more pronounced in the age of instant sharing of ideas. Not only are restrictions difficult to administer, they are also barriers to new mash ups. As Seth Godin says, he could possibly earn some money by getting people to pay to read his blog; but he gets much more by seeding his ideas in the public domain, getting people to talk about it and growing his reputation as a thinker / speaker.
The notion of copyrights is also a lawyers’ delight – for instance, am I violating laws if I lend my book to a friend? What if I lend it to 10 friends? 1000 friends? What if I write the text of a book, post it on my blog and send the link to those friends? David Pogue illustrates how gray this subject is on his post here where he quizzes students about the ethics of digital piracy. Their responses are telling.
But I read the best one on this topic by Suketu Mehta some months back. While traveling in a Mumbai cab, he was accosted by a street kid selling a pirated of “Maximum City”. When told he was the author of the book, the kid offered him a discount. A bit like Mario the postman in “Il Postino”, who having read Pablo Neruda’s romantic poetry narrates it to a village girl as his own – he insists that having read and internalised it, the poetry is no longer Neruda’s but his own. How can you argue against that?
UPDATE: This post by Chris Anderson adds one more interesting perspective to this subject.
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2 comments:
Your and Chris Anderson's point holds good from a creative perspective. But when commerce steps in (making money would be an imperative need for a full time writer) needing to ensure revenue from all sources is natural. It is probably a trade off between being most-read and best-renumerated.
The whole system seems to set for an overhaul. What it calls for is probably a different revenue model - one which makes it profiatble for the creator (through sales of his creation and ancilliary revenues from other related sources) while pricing it such that piracy becomes unviable.
kumar
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