There is a tendency these days, when whining about ‘the evil RIAA and MPAA’ (often hilariously respelled MAFIAA), to be critical of two concepts: Copyright and Corporations. Again and again, I hear people saying stuff like “The corporate copyright MAFIA” and “The content lobby” and other silly terms that try to lump all corporations and all copyright holders together as some super-evil-cartel that presumably has pointy beards and cackles on piles of gold whilst stroking cats and sentencing poor innocent consumers to death.
This is silly.
Corporations produced probably 99% of the stuff in your house (at least). It’s likely everything you currently wear was made by some corporate entity. And even if you have a local independent butchers or bakers, they are likely a corporation too. Not all corporations are evil like Sony or British Airways. Some of them are small family or one-man firms that have been set up as a corporation to look more professional. Positech Games is in fact “Positech Computing Limited”, registered at companies house UK. That doesn’t stop it being just me sat in a spare bedroom.
In a similar way, copyright isn’t some evil monopoly held by EA and Viacom. I own the copyright for all my games. I know loads of people who work full time but write software or games for extra income, and own the copyright on them. Clearly not all copyrighted content earns people millions of dollars. Copyright royalties also provide an income for people not directly in control of it. I employ artist and sound people on contracts, and although they don’t have ownership of the IP, I can only afford to pay them because people are paying me royalties on my previous IP. Without copyright, my artist doesn’t get paid, and nor for that matter does my local baker or butcher.
Another popular argument being thrown around and repeated as though it makes sense is that “I don’t get paid for work I did years ago, so why the hell do musicians and IP owners, they are just lazy.”
I get paid for games I wrote years ago (very little now), and because that system works, I can invest time and energy in making them. I have worked for 8 months on Kudos 2 now, seven days a week, maybe 8 hours a day. You know how much I’ve earned from it?
Nothing
You know what my guaranteed future income is from it?
Nothing
I do this because I’m *hoping* I’ll sell enough copies over the next few years to make that investment worthwhile. If copyright didn’t exist I’d have spent those 8 months doing contract programming for some bank. The game would never get made as there aren’t enough hours in the day. THIS is why copyright exists, and why it’s a GOOD system. Anyone who clings to some hippy dream that “artists will still make music and software and movies without copyright” is either delusional, or living off daddys trust fund. Copyright is essential to provide an incentive for people to invest up front costs in the production of copyable products. If you know of a better system that WORKS NOW, then feel free to make yourself mega-rich by showing us silly copyright supporters how it’s done.