Copyright: Harder than it sounds

Copyright is essential to some industries: None of the thousands of artists who are sampled and sell the rights to be sampled by others would make a cent if there was no copyright. If there was no copyright, nobody would stop the guy next door from opening another drycleaner, and offering the same inventive promotions as me ("free undies night", "two pants for the price of a suit"), and even steal the design of my signs.

If that was true, there would be no incentive for either of us to innovate. We could just try to put up a bigger sign to attract customers, and keep prices lower than our competitors. In the end, the weakest would be pushed out of the market, and we would end up with monopolies, which are more expensive for customers than innovative competitors.

At the same time, creating tools which can be used to infringe on copyright does not necessarily turn out bad - look at the copier, the VCR, and the PC. But that is not the problem, however. The problem is that there is a gap between how people perceive the laws, and the way they are practiced.

There have been countless cases of sampling of artists who did not get paid, much to the detriment of the artist (and not to the artistical value of the music, usually). That is actually wasteful: It takes up resources in the legal system which could be used better, if people knew what the law actually contains. If it did, they could also make intelligent efforts to change it, instead of protesting against the concept outright (present company, of course, exempted).

The real solution is, in other words, education. If the record industry, and the publishing industry, invested their time and money in educating people about what is right and wrong about copyright, perhaps we could have an informed, instead of a sometimes hysterical discussion. That would be a good thing, and force a number of innovations to market. Perhaps that would be a worthwhile initiative to discuss?