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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Isn't part of your argument that these companies offer nothing of value in the first place? If so, why can't individuals avoid them altogether? Oh wait, they can. They can go with a smaller publishing house or record label or movie studio, or self-distribute their work.
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Originally Posted by Buchanan and Campbell, in Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice, Ed. Spinello & Tavani
But, there has been an even more pronounced consolidation of ownership in the mass media: 80% of music is distributed by five companies, and 70% of the major radio markets are controlled by four companies. In 1996, in the U.S., no single entity owned more than six radio stations. Today, Clear Channel owns more than 1,200 stations after the FCC relaxed ownership rules in 1996. Of the 91 “major” televisions networks (including cable), 80% are owned by six companies. In 1947, 80% of newspapers were independently owned. Today, less than 20% are independently owned. In 1992, 70% of prime-time network programming was independently produced. Today, after the FCC rescinded rules separating content and transmission ownership, 75% of prime-time programming is owned by the networks (Lessig, 2003).
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Your "individual author" is a huge red herring, if these figures are anywhere near representative for the book market. (And I suspect that they are)
Also,
the original point of Intellectual Property Rights was to protect the PD/"commons", by providing an incentive for people to go release stuff into the market and from "secrecy" (through offering limited-time monopolies). Today, however, the only point of every IPR change we've seen after 1919 is
to keep stuff from going into the public domain.* The point of IPR was solely this: to provide adequate incentives, (which it already did well before 1998), and from which premise a
retroactive extension is absolutely indefensible. The works
had already been created, so how in heaven's name can you argue that there needed to be more
incentives? Right now the only arguments being made are that it's somehow "unfair" to authors or musicians (or inventors etc) for them not to be rewarded for 90 years+..
But, per your own argument, they should have lobbied for a better contract
at the time of signing, and not 20-50 years later via a retroactive copyright extension.
Also, patents provide an incentive for inventors, sure, but even in industries with razor-thin margins there are still companies willing to jump into a market, and any ecosystem (or market) will after some time figure out a way to function, so it's not as though monopolies are absolute necessities for markets to function. And what patenting is doing right now is arguably just as much stifling of competition as promoting innovation, because nobody is allowed to touch these patents unless they pay egregious and arbitrary licencing fees, even on essential things like dominant software protocols or biomedical stuff.
Without any proof whatever that the markets broadly currently cannot function (did you see the record Boxoffice revenues (topping 10 billion this year) announcement? It seems pretty hard to argue that the movie industry needs more protection via the
DMCA, as all media carriers can be copied at will with the current technology, and yet they're still getting away with whining about the fact that they're being pillaged. Sure, the music industry is having more trouble, but it's hardly as though every company falling under the current copyright legislation is suffering. Why is there no burden of proof? "It's too difficult to calculate losses, so why bother" is not a valid answer, btw.)
* (It was the eleventh time that Congress had extended the term of existing copyrights in the last forty years.)