Welcome to QuestionCopyright.org!

On hearing the word "copyright", many people immediately think of writers and other artists earning a living by selling copies of their works. Often, people also think that copyright is what protects artists from plagiarism — that is, from having their work used by others without proper crediting.

This picture of copyright is mostly a myth. Copyright subsidizes distribution, not creation. It was designed in an age when distribution expenses were the major obstacle in making a work accessible to the public. But today, distribution costs have dropped to zero, thanks to the Internet.

QuestionCopyright.org was founded to spread awareness of how today's copyright system hurts artists and audiences alike, and shackles the Internet to a distribution model designed around the limitations of the printing press. Better systems are possible, but they can only receive fair consideration if we first understand where copyright comes from and what it actually does.

Copyright royalties do not play a significant role in the lives of most artists. Even among those who do earn royalties, very few receive enough to depend on them as a primary source of income. Finally, for that tiny minority who do earn their living primarily from royalties, the majority of royalties for a given work come in the first year or so after that work's release — thus raising the question of why we need copyright terms that extend 70 years after the lifetime of the author. (And this is a compromise: there are some in the distribution industry who argue, apparently seriously, that terms are still too short, and that perpetual copyright would be the best thing.)

Meanwhile, plagiarism is a separate issue from copyright. Virtually all artists understandably want protection from plagiarism, but Internet filesharing actually serves this purpose quite well: when accurately-attributed original copies are widely available, attempts to swipe credit are swiftly detected. This is why the rapid growth of filesharing has not led to a corresponding growth in plagiarism (although there has been improvement in people's ability to discover plagiarism, as we discuss elsewhere). Teenagers who download songs from the Internet do not replace the artist's name with their own, yet they are still prosecuted for copyright violation, because copyright is exactly what its name suggests: a restriction on making copies, even verbatim ones.

For most creative artists, who will earn little or no money from royalties anyway, what really matters is the right to be recognized as the author of their own work, not the right to limit distribution strictly to paying customers. But there are plenty of economic models (some centuries old, some modern) for subsidizing creative activity without restricting everyone's ability to share the results of that activity.

How Modern Copyright Hurts Artists Too

Copyright reform is important not just for audiences, but for artists too. All creative work draws on the past; creators are constantly sampling and modifying the works of their predecessors and peers. Consider jazz music, for example: the field of jazz simply could not exist if copyright were enforced to the letter of the law. Jazz musicians learn their craft by playing and experimenting for each other and for audiences, trading song books, incorporating tunes they've heard into new pieces, and coming up with variations on old standards. They don't just do this in their living rooms — they do it at full-time gigs, part-time gigs, tip jar gigs, talent shows, and every other venue you can imagine. No set of "fair use" exceptions written into copyright law could possibly cover the diverse circumstances in which jazz music thrives.

This freedom to make derivative works is important in all fields, jazz is just one example. The plot of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was not original to Shakespeare (nor would he have claimed otherwise). In modern times, DJs have become genuine artists by paying close attention to the crafts of sampling and modifying. In painting, a standard training method for centuries has been to literally copy the works of older painters, and many of these copies hang in museums today as works of art in their own right. In classical music, the practice of rearranging or writing variations on someone else's piece is a time-honored tradition, and is considered flattery rather than theft.

But today, what used to be common and accepted practices among artists can lead to expensive lawsuits. The result is an increasingly fractured and litigious artistic landscape, in which creators often need the legal resources of larger organizations (publishers and record companies) merely to navigate the complexities of securing rights to use what they need. Again, this is not about plagiarism: no one is talking about claiming credit for something they did not do. Rather, modern copyright law makes it effectively impossible to use the work of others even when properly attributed.

How Did We Get Here?

What we're seeing today is the result of a historical accident: copyright was not originally designed to subsidize creation, it was designed to subsidize distribution. And before that, it was designed to enable censorship.

The origins of copyright law lie in a 1556 English censorship statute, that gave the London Company of Stationers exclusive rights to own and operate printing presses in England. Books were entered into the Company's register not under the author's name, but under the name of a Company member (though such a proto-copyright could be transferred or sold to other Company members). In exchange for their monopoly on the book trade, the Stationers aided the government censors, by controlling what was printed, and by searching out illegal presses and books — they even had the right to burn unauthorized books and destroy presses. They were, in effect, a private, for-profit information police force.

However, around 1700 the government loosened its control on the press and, with no more need for strong censorship, decided to let the Stationers' monopoly expire. Faced with this threat to their livelihood, the Stationers proposed a compromise: a new copyright law, designed around the economics of the printing press, including the physical monopoly inherent in possessing the master plates of a work, which were needed to print reliable, authentic copies of it. The Stationers introduced the notion of an author's right of "ownership" partly as a tactic to reassure Parliament that they were not attempting a large-scale property grab for themselves. Thus, the first true copyright law, the "Statute of Anne" of 1709, originated with the publishing industry (not authors), was modeled on a defunct censorship system, and was designed to subsidize reliable distribution more than creation.

Under the technological circumstances of the time, this new kind of copyright was a reasonable proposal. The Internet is often viewed as an augmented or extended version of the printing press, but in some important ways it is also the opposite of the printing press. When you have only the technology available in eighteenth-century England, making a copy of a printed work from an existing copy is actually very difficult to do reliably. Even the process of transforming an author's handwritten manuscript into a printed version was so fraught with error and caprice that it was a constant source of complaint for authors. Once a work had been printed, it was nearly impossible to duplicate the same print run precisely, simply due to the way physical process of page composition worked. You could come close, but only by putting in a lot of effort, and this meant that publishers had a disincentive to be perfectionists. (All this is in direct contrast to computer networks: on a network, making perfect copies is what happens by default, and you have to put in extra effort to make modifications.)

Thus, the argument the Stationers made to Parliament was essentially that if the bookmakers were to be expected to produce reliable copies, accurately reflecting the author's intentions, they'd need some help — namely, a statutory monopoly granted to the original publisher (who assumed most of the financial risk in printing a work), to protect him from the competition of inferior, but cheaper, copies made by a rival.

This made some sense in eighteenth-century England. It does not make sense today: we've just finished building a worldwide copying machine, why should we not use it to its full potential? The Internet has fundamentally changed the economics of distribution; it's time to change how we think about copyright.

The rest of this site is devoted to exploring these issues in detail.