Quote:
Originally Posted by Sparrow
Creators are consumers too. They have copyright expenses as well as copyright income - I wonder how many actually come out ahead.  |
I'm not advocating this position, but I think it might happen in the coming years. There is no copyright at all. It disappears completely. Creators just create, whether it's original work or the remixing of others, it will all be the same to the audience, who have no respect or even an idea of copyright in the first place.
Respect will be gained through popularity, much like the Karma on mobileread, but a global implementation. Money will not even factor into the creations as there will be very little chance of making profit from your work.
Might sound far fetched, but what would it really take to make this happen in a world that's accelerating at a pace that's never been seen before? We already have, or will have soonish, the technologies to get your creations out to everyone who is connected to the internet. The last bastion of physically produced entertainment products is crumbling in the face of digital distribution - the book.
So let's flip forward two generations. The last of the big companies are dying out in the face of a generation who would no more 'pay' for a product than they would drinking water from a public fountain. In this generation there are superstars of reputation and popularity. And these creators do it for the fans, the reaction of a populace and, being of that generation, have no concept of either 'owning' what they do or 'profiting' monetarily. As the mountain climber says when asked his reasons for climbing - because its there.
It's a hard thought to think being of a 'sandwich generation' too far removed from the purely analogue, but not close enough to the purely digital generation that's emerging now. But I wonder how it can go any other way? All we need look at is the popularity of 'Axxo' on the torrent sites. He takes copyrighted movies, compresses them digitally into 700mb for easy downloads and is a hero to a lot of kids growing up now. Not the content 'creator' but the content 'liberator'.