If the goal is to rid the world of intellectual property theft – if there is such a thing – I would instead recommend the following courses of action:
1. Lower the cost.
Insane prices of anything that can be copied are the number one cause of both Real Piracy – that which is copied by, sold by and/or a profit solely made by someone with no personal or financial connection to the author/creator of the material – and Fake Piracy – that which is copied for personal enjoyment or copied to give away freely for another person’s enjoyment. Lowering prices makes people astonishingly more willing to buy authentic copies for themselves, because that makes them realistically attainable. Consider the situation of attempting to get 5 albums on CD. Let’s see, should we buy them all new at $100 and not be able to buy food for this month? Hmm. How about buy them used for probably around $35 and still be able to eat? Still stuck eating raman but much better overall. I’ll assume you get the point.
2. Pay the artist, not the promoter.
The high prices combined with the fact that the artist receives such a small portion of the profits, makes the choice not to by a new a frequently easy one. Why not buy a used copy, download a compressed version or trade tapes with someone? Most of your money goes to the promoter, the label, the publisher if you buy new. The answer is to do away with these bohemoths. They were a good idea when they started but they’ve outlived their use in this world. Artists need studios and a certain level of promotion and distribution; but beyond basics that could be provided by freelancers or small agencies, the music should speak for and sell itself. The Internet allows for a means of distributed commerce that would have been impossible in years past. We can now built standards for interactive listening, purchase and even electronic distribution that could potentially allow the public find all the new music they could hope to find and pay the artist directly for every copy of the album or even individual song that is purchased..either new, used or downloaded. This leads into step 3.
3. Embed the copyright, free the audience.
When media presentation is enjoyed digitally, you have the unique ability to invent a new method of intellectual commerce. How?
3.1. For starters, you can embed complete creative ownership information into the file and keep it there no matter how many subsequent copies are made or how it is transmitted to the audience – i.e., CD, Minidisc, DVD, Internet Radio, Digital Radio and so on.
3.2. Provide a per-piece purchase price for copied products. This can be both an embedded, time depreciated rate for disconnected network copying devices and a market value rate for networked copying devices; via an artist/item identification string that acts as a homing pigeon for payments to find their author(s).
3.3. Device support. Playback/Copy devices would need four things: a manufacturer/device serial number, a resettable ownership ID key, an internal clock and internet networking support. This would allow the copyrighted material to know where it is, if it should be charging for usage and give the ability for the charge to be initiated.
3.4. Last piece of the puzzle, dedicated servers. A scalable number of servers dotted around the globe could be in charge of maintaining the status and grouping of IDs, placing charges and initiating media transfers.
At this point, I must stress that the technology is less important than the way it is implemented. It could either be used to freely seek out and share entertainment while giving credit and payments to the authors or it could be used to imprison creativity and the enjoyment of expression within a digital hell that nobody wants.
If this technology is used correctly, it can allow the audience to experience the work of the artist/author/creator for free via public delivery, purchase a copy of the individual work or collection (an album, series, etc.) from information embedded in the data stream, make copies to replay the work on other devices they own for free, make exact copies for other people to purchase, and make lower quality copies for others to experience for free. When a payment is to be made on a work of the author, it can be executed directly from the device to the author. No question of authenticity, no bogus charges, no needless limitations for playback, no need for middle-men and less starving artists.
Used incorrectly, this could be the means by which to lock down everyone’s ability to copy, trade and enjoy copyrighted material to the point of futility.
Example: Bob buys an album and plays it on his stereo. Yay, he’s happy. He thinks his friend Sue would might like to listen to one of the songs, so he tries to record it onto a tape. His stereo says “Error – Violation of Copyright. Further attempts to illegally duplicate will result in Fine or Imprisonment. This attempt has been logged and sent to the appropriate authorities.” Whoa, says Bob. That doesn’t sound like a good idea. He decides maybe he should just make her an mp3 of it on his computer. He gets the same error. Strange, thinks Bob. He tries to play the music from his computer. Error, with an additional message that if he wishes, he can purchase a license to play the music on his computer as well. Buy the same album twice? No thanks says Bob. He decides to go over to Sue’s house and just play her the song from his album, directly on her stereo. As he’s leaving the house, the stereo flashes on with a new message, saying that the one time purchase of his music will now be a subscribed service, with a monthly charge of only $59.99 for unlimited playback on his authorized stereo. In the car, Bob starts wanting to hear his new record again and pops the CD into his car stereo. Error it says, and tells him that he’s just been fined $300. Three hundred dollars? That has to be a joke, thinks Bob. He arrives at Sue’s house and tells her about this great song that she should just love listening to. He pops in the record and excitedly presses play. “Error – Violation of Copyright. A warrant for your arrest has just been issued. Please stay where you are. The term of your incarceration is set for 3 months.”
Overall words to remember: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Networked digital entertainment allows distributors to be able to track and punish whoever they feel like messing with at the time. It also allows the public to copy and trade copyrighted material at a much faster rate than before. Both are an abuse that the technology affords. Neither side can fully justify carrying on because of actions taken by the other but I personally feel that the side of the rich and powerful, the record companies and the lawmakers, is one that inflicts a greater detriment to the common good. The reason why is because their final intent is one of restriction, control, benign censorship and greed. The final intent of the file-swapping public however is one of high entropy, community, happiness and freedom. Now I don’t know about everyone else but I tend to see humanity having the traits of the latter. In case this doesn’t ring any bells, I must put forth the reminder that being inhuman is a bad thing.