Copyright Royalty System example essay topic

Today the vast majority of authors get little or no income from copyright royalties. For instance, scientific, technical, and academic journals usually pay nothing to their authors, and most scientific, technical and academic books earn only a few hundred dollars in royalties. Newspaper writers work on salary, and so do magazine writers, or they are free lancers who are paid a flat rate, not a royalty. Only a tiny percentage of authors make any significant portion of their personal income from royalties. Even in the case of books, typically only around five percent of the retail price goes back to the author.

Yes, it is good for writers to be paid, but copyright royalties are a very inefficient way of doing it. So why was copyright developed? It was because of the invention of the printing press. For thousands of years, the only way written works could be duplicated was through a slow and extremely expensive process of copying by hand.

But then the printing press was invented and it became possible to produce an unlimited number of inexpensive copies. However, there was a catch. To produce a printed book requires a very large expense ahead of time for things like editing, typesetting, running off at least a few hundred copies of the book, and promotion. A publisher would be willing to invest all this money only if it knew it would have exclusive rights to publish the book.

Otherwise any book that was a hit would immediately be copied by other publishers, and the original publisher would get little or no return on its investment. So copyright law was created to promote publishing so that the public could enjoy the fruits of the new technology of printing. We have copyright for music recordings for the same reason. The invention of the phonograph made possible cheap copies of music. However, a great deal of money is required to produce the record -- recording studio time, paying musicians, editing, producing a master, producing records at a factory -- and also for promoting and distributing it. Copyright for music guarantees exclusive rights to sell a record, so music companies are willing to put up the money ahead of time to produce records in hopes they will make a profits from them.

So copyright was invented so that society could enjoy the fruits of new inventions for reproducing works. But now we have new technologies that radically change the economics of reproduction. The result is that copyright no longer benefits society. We don't need a huge up-front investment to produce and distribute a book.

A word processor program produces readable copy, and the book can be publicized and distributed over the Internet for next to nothing. The same goes for music. Thanks to personal computers, any band can have its own sound recording and editing studio for a few thousand dollars. And it can burn its recordings to a CD or distribute them over the net.

If there is no need to invest huge sums of money, then there is no need for copyright laws that guarantee publishers or recording companies exclusive rights so they will be motivated to invest said sums. Copyright was needed for the old technology, but now we have a new, vastly more efficient system that doesn't need copyright. In fact, copyright now is functioning as a block to the new, better system. We are going through a transition period in which electronic distribution is gradually replacing material (paper, vinyl records, plastic CDs) distribution. Material works should still be copyrighted, but there should be no legal ban to anyone distributing the same works over the net.

The publishing and recording companies will fight this change tooth and nail, but they will not be acting for the benefit of society. They will only be trying to protect the huge profits they earn from a technology that is becoming obsolete. They want us to pay for their gigantic, expensive infrastructures, even when almost everything they do can now be done at much less expense. They use copyright laws to file lawsuits to block the natural, efficient operation of the new system.

There is one area, however, where we need to keep copyright. Most movies still require an investment in the millions to produce. That means that we still need movie companies, and they need copyright protection (although I must admit that the enormous amount of video piracy that goes on today outside the US has not stopped Hollywood from continuing to enjoy huge profits) And what about paying authors and musicians? A better solution is a system where the reader / listener /downloader can click on a button and send the producer of the work a dollar or two.

If works are any good, then their creators could probably make as much or more this way as through the copyright royalty system. After all, PBS and NPR get along fine on voluntary payment (and turn out much better quality programming than the commercial networks.) Imagine that the printing press and the record never were invented, and we went directly from hand copying and only live performances to the personal computer and the Internet. If people had thought out the best way to organize things in this situation for the benefit of both audiences and authors and musicians, it is extremely unlikely they would have come up with the idea of copyright and royalties as the way to do it. Let's not keep hanging on to a legal idea that made sense in an earlier technological era, but doesn't any more.

Instead let's wipe the mental slate clean and think out from the beginning what is the best way to organize this incredible set of new technologies for the creation and distribution of artistic and intellectual works. Copyright used to be a great benefit to society, but now it is time to get rid of it and create a new system..