About copyright - continued
In continuation of this topic - reasoning about society and social evolution, the meaning and function of copyright and the analysis of the conformity of modern copyright to the goals of its existence.
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All the facts and arguments given in the previous section apply mainly only to animals, but not to humans. For a relatively short period of time (if you count from the moment of the emergence of a rational man - homo sapiens - about 200 thousand years), the person as a species sharply separated from its natural habitat, actively transforming it and creating its own environment - the anthroposphere. Let us try to highlight the reasons for such a dramatic progress by biological standards.
As noted in the previous section, a living organism reacts to external influences, using the information it has. Initially, this information is presented in the form of DNA and RNA molecules; however, in the course of evolutionary development, living organisms turned into self-learning systems, able to use information not only genetic, but also acquired during their lifetime. However, transmitting acquired information through generations of complex living organisms were not able until human society arose.
Konrad Lorenz in his monumental work "Aggression" speaks about this in the following way: "Animals have no symbols that are passed on from generation to generation according to tradition. Generally, if you want to give a definition of an animal that would separate it from a person, then it is here that the line should be drawn. ”
Further in the same chapter, Lorenz notes that a certain transfer of acquired experience is also peculiar to animals, though only to an insignificant degree (compared to man): for example, rats are able to pass on knowledge of the dangers of poisons from generation to generation. The literature describes a remarkable fact that can rightfully be considered an analogue of the author's human activity: in England, tits learned to peck at the lids of bottles with milk and there is cream (this fact and the like are given here, for example); this skill quickly spread throughout the population.
In more detail, the issue of the transfer of acquired experience is developed by Dawkins in Chapter 12 of the "Selfish Gene" and further in the book "Advanced Phenotype". Dawkins writes: “I think that a replicator of a new type has just recently appeared on our planet. He is still in childhood, still clumsily waddling in his primordial broth, but he is evolving with such speed that he leaves the good old gene far behind. ”
Under the "primary broth" Dawkins understands the nutrient medium of human culture, and under the new replicator ( meme ) - the unit of transmission of cultural heritage. The possibility of transmitting not only inherited information, but also accumulated experience radically expands the possibilities of evolution and ultimately creates a new evolving unit — society.
It should be emphasized that the ability to abstract (symbolic) thinking turned out to be decisive in itself - many animals are capable of complex logical constructions - namely, the ability to transfer abstract data. Meme arose when a single nutrient medium appeared - cultural. Cultural contacts have turned a population of people into a new entity - society.
For a more detailed examination of the questions of social evolution, we turn to the following source: L. E. Grinin, A. V. Korotaev. Social macroevolution and the historical process ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 ); We highly recommend this scientific work to be read for a deeper understanding of those general principles, which we briefly describe here and below.
Unlike an animal population, human society is not just a multitude of individuals living in a limited area, but rather something like a multicellular organism. Richard Hollpike in Principles of Social Evolution explores issues of the similarity of an organism to a biological and a social organism, noting that a social organism is divided into organs (public institutions) and cells (individual members of society), with individual cells and organs demonstrating specialization within one organism. All cells of a multicellular organism carry the same set of genes, with the only difference being that different regions of the chromosome are more active in different cell types. Similarly, all members of society are brought up in the same cultural tradition and share a common information fund. If we refer to the cybernetic definition of life given in the previous section, society is a living organism, since it is a controlling system in its pure form.
The main difference of the social organism from the biological organism is the principle of forming the underlying information fund: society independently, through the efforts of its citizens, forms and filters the information fund, which is thus capable of multiple, sometimes radical changes during the life cycle of society.
As an introductory remark, we note that social evolution and social progress are not the same thing. History suggests many examples when civilizations in the course of their development declined, degraded and eventually died. However, in the end, the history of man as a species demonstrates, albeit an uneven, but still a movement from simpler forms of social organization to more complex ones. Therefore, as a first approximation, we will use the words “progress”, “development” and “evolution” as synonyms.
The causes of social evolution are still very poorly investigated at the system level. Many sociologists, starting with Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, put forward their theories of the driving forces of social progress. The most complete critical analysis of various theories is given by Pitirim Sorokin in the article “On the so-called factors of social evolution” . Allow yourself an extensive quotation from this work:
The conclusions of Sorokin are in good agreement with the above considerations: social evolution is the process of accumulation and dissemination of non-hereditary information — replicators of a new type, memes (according to Dawkins) or “concepts” according to Sorokin. Investigating the factors that laid the foundation for social evolution, Grinin and Korotaev write:
The creation, storage and transmission of information are the main condition for the existence of a social organism and at the same time the main result of its vital activity. It is not surprising that in the course of the historical development of mankind, with the increasing division of labor in society, a significant group of people engaged exclusively in the production of intangible values ​​quickly emerged, which, in turn, led in the 20th century to such a complex socio-evolutionary leap as the scientific and technical evolution.
Apparently, along with the appearance of the authors' stratum, copyright also appeared. It is not by chance that the first laws regulating this industry arose during the development of typography, when the formal separation of those who created a work of art or scientific knowledge from those who presented it to the public began. The division of labor in the production and dissemination of information requires a separate additional study, and we will not go into details here.
Finally, we have come close to the question of the meaning and functions of copyright in the context of the social evolution of mankind.
As was shown in the previous sections, social progress is the result and at the same time the source of human innovation; society itself arises as a result of the intensification of information exchange, and the ability of society to perceive new ideas and self-organize into new, more progressive forms at this historical stage of development is not just desirable, but actually necessary for the survival of society; non-evolving social organisms are inevitably supplanted and / or die.
What is copyright? Like any other branch of law, copyright deals with the regulation of a certain area of ​​human activity. As noted in the previous section, in the past few centuries, members of a society engaged in the production of cultural property have been separated into a separate subsystem; copyright arose as a regulator of relations between the subjects of this subsystem among themselves and with the rest of society.
This naturally follows the objectives of the legal regulation of copyright activity: ensuring maximum efficiency of the innovative sphere of society and, consequently, the progress of society as a whole.
Based on the above arguments about the meaning, characteristics and factors of social evolution, we can identify the following objectives of the regulation of innovation:
Separately, it should be emphasized that the regulator is required to ensure not just the constant generation of new information, but also the filtering of the whole set of created ideas to highlight the most promising, leading ultimately to social aromorphosis, i.e. a qualitatively new complication and development of society.
Now that the objectives of the existence of copyright are formulated quite clearly and correctly, we can proceed to the consideration of the contemporary legal system from the point of view of its compliance with its stated goals.
So, which of the goals before it corresponds to modern copyright? Unfortunately, only the fourth. Modern copyright really provides a fairly effective mechanism for providing funding for the innovative sphere of human activity.
Alas, we cannot even consider this task to be fully accomplished, since the existing mechanism contains, in addition to the authors themselves, also a significant appendage to them in the person of the so-called. “Holders of rights”, i.e. companies that do not produce their own intellectual products, but are engaged in administering the processes of the spread of innovation in society. The disadvantages of this way of organizing the interaction of the innovation subsystem with other spheres of society include not only (and not so much) a significant increase in the cost of producing copyright objects (according to some data, about 10 times - for example, in the pharmaceutical industry ), but also that Companies are able to directly influence society as well as authors in their own interests. If we can close our eyes to the first drawback - in fact, no one has proved the possibility of such a redistribution of resources without such costs, which, by the way, are quite well in line with Pareto’s law, then the second drawback seems to us much more serious, since the first interest of the right holder is it is the redistribution of resources to their own benefit, and not the actual innovation activity and, moreover, social aromorphoses and the reorganization of society (which for him, by and large, ershenno not desirable).
However, the influence of information exchange administrators, unfortunately, comes down not only to the redistribution of resources. Since the emergence of mass culture, major rightholders have actually appropriated the right to intervene in the very process of evolution of the information fund.
By virtue of the recognition of the author's exclusive rights to a work, copyright directly and directly interferes with the dissemination of ideas (Dominens memes or Sorokin concepts) in human society. Recall that the intensification of cultural and scientific exchange is integrally the most important reason and at the same time a direct consequence of social progress; modern copyright explicitly limits the distribution of memes in society, putting the purely economic interests of a limited group of people at the forefront. In the light of the above reasoning, we can state that the arguments given in paragraph 2.1 of the advocates of the existing concept of intellectual property are incorrect in essence: only intensification of cultural and scientific exchange leads to further accumulation of intellectual values ​​and, ultimately, to social progress; the redistribution of resources in favor of the innovation sphere by reducing the intensity of information exchange in the long term will lead to slower progress, since it is the increasing intensity of information exchange that is the basis for the redistribution of resources, but not vice versa.
By itself, the principle of payment for each conditional act of data transfer under conditions of an exponential increase in the intensity of information exchange will sooner or later lead to the fact that society will simply not be able to pay royalties, no matter how low the price is for each copy. In this situation, further social development is simply unprofitable for society as a whole and for each person individually.
The construction of artificial barriers to the spread of memes, which is achieved by today's “human rights” organizations, leads to a slowdown or even cessation of the microevolution of memes, the division of the global information space into many local ones, to information hunger and evolutionary stagnation. If we go back to comparing a biological and social organism, then charging a fee for access to information is approximately equivalent to charging a fee for access to the bloodstream from a cell. However, reducing the intensity of cultural and scientific exchange is not the only problem with effective copyright. The modern industry of the production of intellectual values ​​more and more obviously levels out the importance of the selection factors that should act over the information fund. Just as in the field of production of material values, in the field of culture there is a steady shift of the center of gravity towards the production of disposable works. For the industry of mass culture, focusing on the greatest possible number of consumers, it is advantageous to produce such a product, which, on the one hand, attracts consumers with its novelty, and on the other - quickly annoys. As a result, the absolute majority of the produced cultural values ​​in the end did not go to the universal human information fund, quickly being crowded out by another one-day crafts. The specific mechanisms that ultimately lead to the production of a surrogate cultural product will be considered later in a separate study.
At the same time, it is worth noting that the mass culture industry not only floods the market with a low-quality product, but also strives ultimately to oust from the public consciousness those values ​​that had been accumulated over the previous several centuries of human activity. Although in modern law there is the concept of “public domain”, which, logically, should be distributed free of charge, in reality there are no mechanisms ensuring its preferential distribution, and the policy of leading publishers actually ignores this very “public domain”. Here, for example, the recordings of Beethoven and Rachmaninov ’s works on amazon.com (copyright on Beethoven’s works expired, but not on Rachmaninov’s works) - try to find the difference in cost between them. Or, for example, the difference in the cost of the tragedies of Shakespeare and the books of Dan Brown .
Since copyright legislation does not stimulate the spread of “public domain” (and, moreover, it impedes in some way, because the user is actually responsible for independently determining the legality of the copy of the author’s work that came to him), in fact this rule is nothing more than a fiction. For example, we do not know of any significant public domain collection of music records. Since the public domain is placed in open access by enthusiasts (with the rare support of the state), there is no possibility of competing with the mass media in the field of promotion and dissemination of information about oneself.
In fact, information dissemination administrators have assumed the right to make selection over an information fund, since they are capable of creating obviously unequal conditions for the survival of various memes. Putting a patent on the table, which is not being introduced due to an overpriced price, is virtually useless. Actively advertised pop music has many times greater chances to occupy the “habitat” of memes, rather than those forms of art in which money is not invested.
And finally, we will touch on the issue of evaluation and innovation. It is completely obvious that modern legislation expressly prohibits the rapid introduction of technical and cultural achievements, giving the author the right of full control over the published work, which means not only the material qualifications for the spread of innovation, but also simply the possibility of prohibiting the introduction of innovation or setting selectively barrage conditions for implementation . As for the transformation of society through the introduction of technical and, especially, cultural innovations, this opportunity seems to us quite incredible in modern conditions.
So, modern copyright does not correspond to the goals of its existence on all points, except, perhaps, regulating the distribution of resources in favor of the authors (and right holders). It is this fact that makes me say that modern legislation should be revised, and completely revised, and not the usual arguments about the injustice of charging for non-commercial use, an unfair assessment of lost profits, inflated prices, and so on. Changing copyright should not include just a mechanism for intensifying cultural exchange - and this is relatively easy to do - but also norms that will re-launch the factors of artificial selection over the information fund and the introduction innovation. Without this, the simple permission to freely download from torrents is meaningless in essence, since social progress is not limited only to the simple accumulation of information as such.
Frankly, I personally do not yet see how the current situation can be broken. I fully admit that the point of no return has already been passed, and a return to the "normal" forms of selection is no longer possible. Whether new forms of selection will be suitable for further social development is a big question, and there is no definite answer to it yet.
I hereby convey the above text to the public domain.
2.3. Society and social evolution
')
All the facts and arguments given in the previous section apply mainly only to animals, but not to humans. For a relatively short period of time (if you count from the moment of the emergence of a rational man - homo sapiens - about 200 thousand years), the person as a species sharply separated from its natural habitat, actively transforming it and creating its own environment - the anthroposphere. Let us try to highlight the reasons for such a dramatic progress by biological standards.
As noted in the previous section, a living organism reacts to external influences, using the information it has. Initially, this information is presented in the form of DNA and RNA molecules; however, in the course of evolutionary development, living organisms turned into self-learning systems, able to use information not only genetic, but also acquired during their lifetime. However, transmitting acquired information through generations of complex living organisms were not able until human society arose.
Konrad Lorenz in his monumental work "Aggression" speaks about this in the following way: "Animals have no symbols that are passed on from generation to generation according to tradition. Generally, if you want to give a definition of an animal that would separate it from a person, then it is here that the line should be drawn. ”
Further in the same chapter, Lorenz notes that a certain transfer of acquired experience is also peculiar to animals, though only to an insignificant degree (compared to man): for example, rats are able to pass on knowledge of the dangers of poisons from generation to generation. The literature describes a remarkable fact that can rightfully be considered an analogue of the author's human activity: in England, tits learned to peck at the lids of bottles with milk and there is cream (this fact and the like are given here, for example); this skill quickly spread throughout the population.
In more detail, the issue of the transfer of acquired experience is developed by Dawkins in Chapter 12 of the "Selfish Gene" and further in the book "Advanced Phenotype". Dawkins writes: “I think that a replicator of a new type has just recently appeared on our planet. He is still in childhood, still clumsily waddling in his primordial broth, but he is evolving with such speed that he leaves the good old gene far behind. ”
Under the "primary broth" Dawkins understands the nutrient medium of human culture, and under the new replicator ( meme ) - the unit of transmission of cultural heritage. The possibility of transmitting not only inherited information, but also accumulated experience radically expands the possibilities of evolution and ultimately creates a new evolving unit — society.
It should be emphasized that the ability to abstract (symbolic) thinking turned out to be decisive in itself - many animals are capable of complex logical constructions - namely, the ability to transfer abstract data. Meme arose when a single nutrient medium appeared - cultural. Cultural contacts have turned a population of people into a new entity - society.
For a more detailed examination of the questions of social evolution, we turn to the following source: L. E. Grinin, A. V. Korotaev. Social macroevolution and the historical process ( part 1 , part 2 , part 3 ); We highly recommend this scientific work to be read for a deeper understanding of those general principles, which we briefly describe here and below.
Unlike an animal population, human society is not just a multitude of individuals living in a limited area, but rather something like a multicellular organism. Richard Hollpike in Principles of Social Evolution explores issues of the similarity of an organism to a biological and a social organism, noting that a social organism is divided into organs (public institutions) and cells (individual members of society), with individual cells and organs demonstrating specialization within one organism. All cells of a multicellular organism carry the same set of genes, with the only difference being that different regions of the chromosome are more active in different cell types. Similarly, all members of society are brought up in the same cultural tradition and share a common information fund. If we refer to the cybernetic definition of life given in the previous section, society is a living organism, since it is a controlling system in its pure form.
The main difference of the social organism from the biological organism is the principle of forming the underlying information fund: society independently, through the efforts of its citizens, forms and filters the information fund, which is thus capable of multiple, sometimes radical changes during the life cycle of society.
2.4. About the driving forces of social progress
As an introductory remark, we note that social evolution and social progress are not the same thing. History suggests many examples when civilizations in the course of their development declined, degraded and eventually died. However, in the end, the history of man as a species demonstrates, albeit an uneven, but still a movement from simpler forms of social organization to more complex ones. Therefore, as a first approximation, we will use the words “progress”, “development” and “evolution” as synonyms.
The causes of social evolution are still very poorly investigated at the system level. Many sociologists, starting with Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, put forward their theories of the driving forces of social progress. The most complete critical analysis of various theories is given by Pitirim Sorokin in the article “On the so-called factors of social evolution” . Allow yourself an extensive quotation from this work:
It is in [...] the difference between man and animal that the whole essence of the matter lies. This difference makes it possible for the existence of a special science from biology - sociology, which specifically studies the phenomena and properties of specifically human ones. If it were not for this difference, there would be no sociology, then all human phenomena would fit in the field of biology. But this difference is evident, and therefore sociology is also evident. And from this it follows by itself that its object of study should be specifically social (non-biological) phenomena, and in particular on the question of factors of evolution - not biological, but purely social factors. Meanwhile, many of these factors — reproduction, nutrition, race control, anthropological structure, geographical and climatic conditions, suffering and pleasure, and others — all of these factors, common to the animal world, are general biological and even physico-chemical. These are all objects of biology, not sociology. From this it becomes clear the illegality of such a solution to the problem of social factors.
[...]
As can be seen from the above, in the question of the factors of social evolution, both formally and essentially only deal with social factors, and not with other factors. Now the question is: what are these or this factor, the main reason that causes not the very fact of social evolution?
[...]
The essence of a social phenomenon is the fact of interaction between individuals and groups. But, of course, this is far from being said. [...] A social phenomenon is a world of concepts, a world of logical (scientific - in the strict sense of the word) being, resulting in the process of interaction (collective experience) of human individuals. [...] The human society, the whole culture and the whole civilization is ultimately nothing but the world of concepts, frozen in a certain form and in certain forms.
The conclusions of Sorokin are in good agreement with the above considerations: social evolution is the process of accumulation and dissemination of non-hereditary information — replicators of a new type, memes (according to Dawkins) or “concepts” according to Sorokin. Investigating the factors that laid the foundation for social evolution, Grinin and Korotaev write:
Already at the pre-human level, among a number of highly organized animals, there is the existence of a largely genetically behavioral predisposition towards exploratory activity, which can be considered as a completely autonomous and fundamental driving force of sociocultural evolution in general and a powerful factor of social development in particular.
The creation, storage and transmission of information are the main condition for the existence of a social organism and at the same time the main result of its vital activity. It is not surprising that in the course of the historical development of mankind, with the increasing division of labor in society, a significant group of people engaged exclusively in the production of intangible values ​​quickly emerged, which, in turn, led in the 20th century to such a complex socio-evolutionary leap as the scientific and technical evolution.
Apparently, along with the appearance of the authors' stratum, copyright also appeared. It is not by chance that the first laws regulating this industry arose during the development of typography, when the formal separation of those who created a work of art or scientific knowledge from those who presented it to the public began. The division of labor in the production and dissemination of information requires a separate additional study, and we will not go into details here.
2.5. On copyright functions in human society
Finally, we have come close to the question of the meaning and functions of copyright in the context of the social evolution of mankind.
As was shown in the previous sections, social progress is the result and at the same time the source of human innovation; society itself arises as a result of the intensification of information exchange, and the ability of society to perceive new ideas and self-organize into new, more progressive forms at this historical stage of development is not just desirable, but actually necessary for the survival of society; non-evolving social organisms are inevitably supplanted and / or die.
What is copyright? Like any other branch of law, copyright deals with the regulation of a certain area of ​​human activity. As noted in the previous section, in the past few centuries, members of a society engaged in the production of cultural property have been separated into a separate subsystem; copyright arose as a regulator of relations between the subjects of this subsystem among themselves and with the rest of society.
This naturally follows the objectives of the legal regulation of copyright activity: ensuring maximum efficiency of the innovative sphere of society and, consequently, the progress of society as a whole.
Based on the above arguments about the meaning, characteristics and factors of social evolution, we can identify the following objectives of the regulation of innovation:
- Intensification of the interaction of individuals in the Sorokin sense as the transfer of concepts and ideas (memes).
- Ensuring continuous generation and selective preservation of innovative information, i.e. the implementation of a conscious, purposeful and continuous artificial selection over the information fund.
- Qualitative assessment and the most rapid and flexible implementation of developed innovations, up to a complete reorganization of the structure of society.
- Redistribution of the resources available to society for the maintenance of the strata of the society engaged in the production of scientific and spiritual values ​​and, moreover, providing it with a social base for further development.
Separately, it should be emphasized that the regulator is required to ensure not just the constant generation of new information, but also the filtering of the whole set of created ideas to highlight the most promising, leading ultimately to social aromorphosis, i.e. a qualitatively new complication and development of society.
Now that the objectives of the existence of copyright are formulated quite clearly and correctly, we can proceed to the consideration of the contemporary legal system from the point of view of its compliance with its stated goals.
3. On the modern copyright system
3.1. Copyright as a resource allocation regulator
So, which of the goals before it corresponds to modern copyright? Unfortunately, only the fourth. Modern copyright really provides a fairly effective mechanism for providing funding for the innovative sphere of human activity.
Alas, we cannot even consider this task to be fully accomplished, since the existing mechanism contains, in addition to the authors themselves, also a significant appendage to them in the person of the so-called. “Holders of rights”, i.e. companies that do not produce their own intellectual products, but are engaged in administering the processes of the spread of innovation in society. The disadvantages of this way of organizing the interaction of the innovation subsystem with other spheres of society include not only (and not so much) a significant increase in the cost of producing copyright objects (according to some data, about 10 times - for example, in the pharmaceutical industry ), but also that Companies are able to directly influence society as well as authors in their own interests. If we can close our eyes to the first drawback - in fact, no one has proved the possibility of such a redistribution of resources without such costs, which, by the way, are quite well in line with Pareto’s law, then the second drawback seems to us much more serious, since the first interest of the right holder is it is the redistribution of resources to their own benefit, and not the actual innovation activity and, moreover, social aromorphoses and the reorganization of society (which for him, by and large, ershenno not desirable).
However, the influence of information exchange administrators, unfortunately, comes down not only to the redistribution of resources. Since the emergence of mass culture, major rightholders have actually appropriated the right to intervene in the very process of evolution of the information fund.
3.2. The impact of copyright on the dissemination of ideas
By virtue of the recognition of the author's exclusive rights to a work, copyright directly and directly interferes with the dissemination of ideas (Dominens memes or Sorokin concepts) in human society. Recall that the intensification of cultural and scientific exchange is integrally the most important reason and at the same time a direct consequence of social progress; modern copyright explicitly limits the distribution of memes in society, putting the purely economic interests of a limited group of people at the forefront. In the light of the above reasoning, we can state that the arguments given in paragraph 2.1 of the advocates of the existing concept of intellectual property are incorrect in essence: only intensification of cultural and scientific exchange leads to further accumulation of intellectual values ​​and, ultimately, to social progress; the redistribution of resources in favor of the innovation sphere by reducing the intensity of information exchange in the long term will lead to slower progress, since it is the increasing intensity of information exchange that is the basis for the redistribution of resources, but not vice versa.
By itself, the principle of payment for each conditional act of data transfer under conditions of an exponential increase in the intensity of information exchange will sooner or later lead to the fact that society will simply not be able to pay royalties, no matter how low the price is for each copy. In this situation, further social development is simply unprofitable for society as a whole and for each person individually.
The construction of artificial barriers to the spread of memes, which is achieved by today's “human rights” organizations, leads to a slowdown or even cessation of the microevolution of memes, the division of the global information space into many local ones, to information hunger and evolutionary stagnation. If we go back to comparing a biological and social organism, then charging a fee for access to information is approximately equivalent to charging a fee for access to the bloodstream from a cell. However, reducing the intensity of cultural and scientific exchange is not the only problem with effective copyright. The modern industry of the production of intellectual values ​​more and more obviously levels out the importance of the selection factors that should act over the information fund. Just as in the field of production of material values, in the field of culture there is a steady shift of the center of gravity towards the production of disposable works. For the industry of mass culture, focusing on the greatest possible number of consumers, it is advantageous to produce such a product, which, on the one hand, attracts consumers with its novelty, and on the other - quickly annoys. As a result, the absolute majority of the produced cultural values ​​in the end did not go to the universal human information fund, quickly being crowded out by another one-day crafts. The specific mechanisms that ultimately lead to the production of a surrogate cultural product will be considered later in a separate study.
At the same time, it is worth noting that the mass culture industry not only floods the market with a low-quality product, but also strives ultimately to oust from the public consciousness those values ​​that had been accumulated over the previous several centuries of human activity. Although in modern law there is the concept of “public domain”, which, logically, should be distributed free of charge, in reality there are no mechanisms ensuring its preferential distribution, and the policy of leading publishers actually ignores this very “public domain”. Here, for example, the recordings of Beethoven and Rachmaninov ’s works on amazon.com (copyright on Beethoven’s works expired, but not on Rachmaninov’s works) - try to find the difference in cost between them. Or, for example, the difference in the cost of the tragedies of Shakespeare and the books of Dan Brown .
Since copyright legislation does not stimulate the spread of “public domain” (and, moreover, it impedes in some way, because the user is actually responsible for independently determining the legality of the copy of the author’s work that came to him), in fact this rule is nothing more than a fiction. For example, we do not know of any significant public domain collection of music records. Since the public domain is placed in open access by enthusiasts (with the rare support of the state), there is no possibility of competing with the mass media in the field of promotion and dissemination of information about oneself.
In fact, information dissemination administrators have assumed the right to make selection over an information fund, since they are capable of creating obviously unequal conditions for the survival of various memes. Putting a patent on the table, which is not being introduced due to an overpriced price, is virtually useless. Actively advertised pop music has many times greater chances to occupy the “habitat” of memes, rather than those forms of art in which money is not invested.
And finally, we will touch on the issue of evaluation and innovation. It is completely obvious that modern legislation expressly prohibits the rapid introduction of technical and cultural achievements, giving the author the right of full control over the published work, which means not only the material qualifications for the spread of innovation, but also simply the possibility of prohibiting the introduction of innovation or setting selectively barrage conditions for implementation . As for the transformation of society through the introduction of technical and, especially, cultural innovations, this opportunity seems to us quite incredible in modern conditions.
Conclusion and conclusions
So, modern copyright does not correspond to the goals of its existence on all points, except, perhaps, regulating the distribution of resources in favor of the authors (and right holders). It is this fact that makes me say that modern legislation should be revised, and completely revised, and not the usual arguments about the injustice of charging for non-commercial use, an unfair assessment of lost profits, inflated prices, and so on. Changing copyright should not include just a mechanism for intensifying cultural exchange - and this is relatively easy to do - but also norms that will re-launch the factors of artificial selection over the information fund and the introduction innovation. Without this, the simple permission to freely download from torrents is meaningless in essence, since social progress is not limited only to the simple accumulation of information as such.
Frankly, I personally do not yet see how the current situation can be broken. I fully admit that the point of no return has already been passed, and a return to the "normal" forms of selection is no longer possible. Whether new forms of selection will be suitable for further social development is a big question, and there is no definite answer to it yet.
I hereby convey the above text to the public domain.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/86421/
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