MeltingWaldo

There are many who speak out against patents and copyright. At Business of Software 2008, Richard Stallman explained very effectively why they don’t work in the software industry. At Cambridge Business Lectures, Cory Doctorow talked about its effect on the music industry. So what would happen if we waved our magic wand and removed all patents and all copyrights from the world…?

Let’s use authors for our hypothetical, specifically me. I just wrote a book titled “How to genetically engineer shorter necks – No giraffe should be an outcast” in .pdf format (I didn’t, but this is my hypothetical). Now there are two people who want to (or ‘have to’) read it: my two hypothetical friends, Ms Fan in Australia and Mr Groupie in the UK. In our new ‘IP free’ world, Mr Groupie can buy the book and would have the complete legal freedom to copy it. So he emails it to Ms Fan and for her, it’s just as if she bought the book herself – no torn covers, dog-eared pages or delays for postage that accompany the ‘old-fashioned’ style book.

So back in the real world (temporarily only – I quite like the idea of at least two devotees), most authors get their books into book stores via their publisher. However, once devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle take over from dead-wood books, physical distribution is replaced by the giant copying machine in the sky (aka the internet). As you saw above, without IP laws, the author is not the only distributor, but every reader of the book is also a potential distributor – very effective indeed.

So what’s left for our book publishers to do? Umm, they could serve as a pool of authors’ resources to protect authors rights – that is, sue individual people who try to get hold of a free copy of the book. They could also do a whole series of innovatively ineffectual DRM schemes, like requiring the handful of die-hard paying customers to send a secret code via SMS every 15 minutes that they want to keep reading the book they just “bought” (I mean licensed in 15 minute blocks)… thus guaranteeing that the free, albeit illegal, copy remains far superior in every aspect.

Clearly, if we have no IP laws, then the traditional role of book publishers ceases to exist. Yes, other services such as editing and promotion are still useful, but they become independent services unbundled from the defunct distribution process that currently ties it all together.

But do I really want everyone to get my book (hard work) for free, I hear you asking? Am I really that foolish a person…? The answer is no, but we’ll tackle that next week…