Dean Wesley Smith paints a fairly alarmist picture of Life After Copyright.
I think his conclusions are least improbable with regard to the future of text-based publishing. Fiction writing as a profession might well disappear completely, and I wouldn't be surprised if non-fiction contracted a good deal. Not entirely, because there are more people who need both the data and the analysis non-fiction writing represents, but I would be shocked, shocked! if, for instance, the entire self-help category didn't wither away.
I think his conclusions about advertising are completely wrongheaded, and the ones about broadcast television seem to ignore that getting rid of
copyright wouldn't affect people's ownership of the
distribution method. I also think that he disregards the extent to which digitally locked software would be used by commercial software publishers; does he realize that Microsoft Office, for instance, right now uses a digital lock to make you pay for it, if it's not pre-installed on your desktop? I don't understand
at all his contention that
hardware innovation would cease.
He says that musicians would have to play to live audiences to make money, as if that's something new. My understanding of the music business is that pretty much no musicians make their money from selling recordings to consumers, and that even the number of artists who make money from non-commissioned re-use of their music (like on soundtracks or in commercials) is pretty low. It would be the complete end of the
popstar, but that's a weird relic of restricted distribution and promotion channels anyway. Soundtracks would get really weird, as people would, instead of saying, "Make me something sort of like Danny Elfman" remix old Danny Elfman and avoid paying Danny Elfman a commission to create. What I don't know is how much musicians are making from performance licensing, like in a jukebox or from Muzak. (However, even those royalties are largely limited to the musicians who managed to sell a pop single on the national stage and,and not so much your favorite klezmer, go-go, or zydeco act.)
Two things that I find it just, very weird for him to not consider at all. One, people do choose to pay for things that are offered for free. Now, they don't pay as much as you want and they may want their name on what they paid for and it and a lot of people won't pay … but one can get paid for something people enjoy and want to encourage more of, and one can get paid for things people want to be assured they have authentic copies of.
And, two, there's generally a lag in copyright between a thing being
invented and a thing being subject to copyright, and yet the thing manages to persist for that interval. Computer programs weren't copyrighted until 1980, as the most recent example. (And the reasons computers weren't ubiquitous and useful before that point have a lot more to do with lack of standards, interoperability, and hardware weakness than they do with not having copyright until that point.)
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