Disruption of innovation

"Soft SOPA" & How Copyright Disrupts Technological Innovation

Copyright and free speech have been at the forefront quite a bit lately. To some, we need to afford protections to creators. To others, it is manipulation of laws to suit their personal wants. The result is everybody losing.

The internet has created a huge disruption in sales and distribution of many kinds of media, including movies and music. The biggest problem many people have pointed out has been that, rather than adapt, old business models refused to adapt and instead tried to get laws to force things from changing. This is especially obvious of the RIAA who simply fought against the MP3 format rather than embrace and use it. Now, Apple, Amazon, Google, and many others are making a lot of money they never will. All because they refused to change.

Instead, they tried manipulating laws and suing people in order to extract money. For this, the popular media and the public have demonized them. Yet they continue for the sake of stagnation.

This is a disruption of innovation.

Disruption in the business world is supposed to strengthen the money that goes in and out of coffers, but this is because people are “building better mousetraps”. When innovation is disrupted, they are essentially happy to let the mice run free if their product does not work properly.

The issue here is copyright. Copyright is not a bad thing in and of itself. Nevertheless, the way it has been manipulated has forced people to fight in ways that are shocking to the old business models. In the past, if someone profited off your work without permission, you could sue him or her for profits. With the modern internet, they have encouraged people to fight back by not making money off those works.

This strikes me as interesting. They know these people are not making money and yet they sue them anyway. Where exactly is the profit? I could go on and on, but plenty of people have realized this is a dead horse. Well, everyone except lawyers…

The point is, we have a broken system, and that is our current copyright laws. We need to overhaul it. It used to be your work was yours for 14 to 28 years, which may not seem long now, but let us consider how long a work is profitable. A book comes out. It will sell, make some money, movie rights are sold, it becomes a blockbuster, toy action figures are sold, kids have the characters on their lunchboxes (do they still do that?), and so on. The time frame for this? Let us take Harry Potter as an example. The first book was released in 1997 and the last movie was released in 2011. If we take that series as a whole for our argument, that is 14 years alone. Obviously, the series was VERY profitable. To this day, it is still making money. The 28-year limit above was if an author applied for an extension, and you can be sure J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros. would have applied for that extension.

By 2025, Harry Potter’s fame and profitability should be very much diminished, such that entry in to the public domain would not really cost anyone. That is 28 years. So what about Disney? Mickey Mouse is still popular and they are making money off of it, right? Disney is a poor example of protecting copyrights. Simply put, they have made quite a bit of money off of public domain properties. Disney’s first feature length film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. The movie was derived from Snow White, first officially published, if I understand my sources correctly, in 1857. They made a fortune off that movie using nothing but a public domain work.