johaneriksson.se

The issue of intellectual property rights and the widespread piracy of movies, computer games and music is a difficult one to solve, and — indeed — a difficult one in which to find one’s bearings. While I do believe that protection for property holders from piracy is warrented today’s system is obviously broke, and the industry strategy of chasing their potential consumers isn’t exactly earning them goodwill.

Morally I think the idea that you have the right to decide whether you demand something for others to make use of your work (that is listen, watch, play, modify and so forth) or not seem reasonable. Combine this with the right to make deals and that such deals should be legally binding and that would seem like a solution. From a pragmatic point of view though, a full scale protection of this kind seem to have little public support. This doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, but it does mean that maintaining it will surely provoke opposite reactions thereby making such a solution self defeating in a sense. Therefore intellectual property rights need to be reformed.

My suggestion would be a standard deal where protection would be upheld for a period of time vastly shorter than what is the fact today (as I’ve written earlier in Swedish). Something like a couple of years for music, perhaps five or so years for movies and software and ten for books. The actual numbers aren’t important. The point would be to keep the rights protected for a length of time in which a vast majority of the revenue is generated and then make the product free. Obviously owners of intellectual property rights would still be free to decide that they want to make deals that are less restrictive (like Open Source and such).

No matter if that happens or not the industries need to seriously reconsider their strategy. They should offer more freebies of older material, provide more way — and more convienient ways — to buy their products, they should avoid all sorts of DRM and copy protection (since that sort of stuff only make things harder for those who pay, but has no effect on those who doesn’t) and they should find a pricing structure that people find reasonable. That should be obvious market decisions but apparently it isn’t.

Finally I would like to recommend Johan Norbergs thoughts on the issue. Intelligent and well worth reading for anyone interested — especially if you, like me, think that the capitalistic economic model is a good one.