Source: http://blog.intellectualprivilege.com/2007/12/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 02:44:29+00:00

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While rightly shuddering at specter of copyism, we should also recognize that the unauthorized use of copyrighted works can, if it does not go so far as to undercut authors' incentives, increase social wealth. Consider, for instance, an impoverished entrepreneur relying on pirated software to start her business. Supposing that she could not afford to buy an authorized copy, and that her unauthorized use would not depress software production, her infringement would generate a welcome consumer surplus. The same would hold true of, say, someone who enjoys an infringing copy of a CD despite being unwilling to pay its retail price. As [the figure below] illustrates, those exceptions to the strict enforcement of copyright law could in theory benefit us all without discouraging the production and distribution of expressive works.
[The above figure] surely offers too sanguine a view of the effects of copyright infringement, however. Without the limitations imposed by copyright law, some consumers who would otherwise willingly pay for authorized uses might instead opt to save their money by joining the unpaying masses of unauthorized users. The resulting exodus, from respecting copyright to infringing it, would risk decreasing the revenues afforded by copyright, bringing about the policy tragedy portrayed [earlier].
How does copyright law dispel that, the specter of copyism? By imposing high marginal costs on infringing uses of protected works. Absent the Copyright Act, and especially in digital works, an infringer would generally face the same low marginal reproduction costs as a copyright holder. Thanks to the Copyright Act, an infringer might have to pay actual or statutory damages, lost profits, costs, and/or attorney's fees to a copyright holder for every unauthorized use.
How high should lawmakers set the marginal costs of infringement? We wouldn't want them to under-deter it, lest the specter of copyism become all too real. Nor would we want them to overdo it, given that a modest level of infringement can deliver social gains. Theory suggests that lawmakers should set the marginal costs of infringement, taking into account that only some infringing uses get caught and litigated, just high enough to ensure that authorized users will have no incentive to opt for paying less than enough to sustain authorship. [The figure below] illustrates.
So, at least, goes copyright in theory. In practice, as discussed in chapter 4, lawmakers lack both the information and incentives to calibrate copyright policy so precisely. These economic models thus only explain how copyright law should work—not how it does work.
Some commentators have defended copyrights as natural rights under Locke's labor-desert theory of property. On that view, copyright qualifies as a natural right for the same reason that tangible property does: Because an author mixes herself, through her creative effort, in her expressions. Ayn Rand, Herbert Spencer, and Lysander Spooner represent prominent proponents of that justification of copyright.
That facially plausible extension of Locke's theory does not, however, withstand close scrutiny. His labor-desert justification of property gives an author clear title only to the particular tangible copy in which she fixes her expression--not to some intangible plat in the noumenal realm of ideas. Locke himself did not try to justify intangible property. He appears, in fact, to have viewed copyright as merely a policy tool for promoting the public good. Modern commentators who would venture so far beyond the boundaries of Locke's thought and into the abstractions of intellectual property thus ought to leave his name behind.
More pointedly, copyright contradicts Locke's justification of property. He described legislation authorizing the Stationers' Company monopoly on printing—the nearest thing to a Copyright Act in his day—as a "manifest . . . invasion of the trade, liberty, and property of the subject." Even today, by invoking government power a copyright holder can impose prior restraint, fines, imprisonment, and confiscation on those engaged in peaceful expression and the quiet enjoyment of physical property. By thus gagging our voices, tying our hands, and demolishing our presses, copyright law violates the very rights that Locke defended.
Of all the theories of natural rights reviewed [in this chapter], Locke's probably has the greatest likelihood of influencing present-day law. For all that, though, it runs little risk of convincing contemporary lawmakers or courts to forsake the prevailing, instrumentalist view of copyright. The Lockean labor-desert theory has only one viable road to practical and present influence—via original meaning. Many judges find appeals to the original meaning of constitutional language, such as that embodied in the copyright clause, quite persuasive. As our careful review of the historical record showed [earlier in the chapter], however, the Founders almost certainly did not regard copyright as a natural right.
When you infringe a copyright, you can admit to breaking the law without also admitting to violating a natural right. Thus does a good driver on an empty road speed with a clear conscience.
So, too, might a citizen drive dangerously close to the Tax Code's limits. To misjudge, and blunder into tax evasion, could lead to loss of liberty and property. Citizens thus obey the Tax Code for good reason. Voluntary payment of excess taxes remains very rare, however; most people evidently pay their taxes under compulsion rather than out of joy. In that, the Tax Code resembles the Copyright Act. Both rely on positive legislation; both create regulatory regimes; both redistribute property (money in the one case, rights to throats, pens, and presses in the other). We grudgingly accept that the Tax Code and the Copyright Act create special beneficiaries of State power, the former by way of tax credits, the latter by way of exclusive rights. We might even celebrate it, reasoning that both the poor and authors merit our generosity. But we do not speak of a natural right to welfare. Nor should we speak of a natural right to copyright.
None of that goes to show that we should infringe copyrights. Speaking only for myself, I try to respect them. I probably misjudge, sometimes, I admit. Copyright contains many subtleties, even to an avowed geek, and its application often relies on contestable facts. We often don't know what constitutes infringement unless and until a judge tells us. It doesn't matter to copyright law if I do not bow deeply enough to its commands, of course. I—like you and everyone else subject to the Copyright Act—am held strictly liable for my infringing acts.
Still, I try to respect copyright law. It does not unduly burden me, I find, and I have a profound appreciation of good authorship. I do not think that copyright's beneficiaries have any natural right to my obedience, however; nor do I think that, say, Medicare's beneficiaries have any natural right to my tax payments. But I think that authors, like the poor, merit our concern and material aid. Government programs somewhat promote that aim. They operate with dismaying inefficiency, however, and often with outrageous unfairness. Thus did the U.S. federal government recently enact welfare reform. Thus, too, should we reform authors' welfare: copyright.
You probably try to heed copyright law, too. Most people do. Why? We recognize copying limits, like speed limits and tax codes, as legislation designed to maximize social utility, created by statute for presumptively good reasons and thus, unless manifestly inefficient or inequitable, enjoying some claim to our obedience. We follow such laws out of patriotism, unreflective habit, grudging acceptance, or fear—but not because they protect natural rights.
So, to judge from actions, go the moral intuitions of most folks. We regard violations of persons, property, and promises as serious matters, dire deviations from acceptable social behavior. We regard casual copyright infringement, in contrast, as little worse than driving 80 m.p.h. in a 65 m.p.h. zone, or exaggerating the value of a charitable donation.
To say that copyright does not protect any natural right is not to say that it lacks any moral justification. We naturally frown on unauthorized and misattributed copying. A singer who claims authorship of a song written by another commits a sort of fraud on his listeners. Most of the time, that sort of fraud does not rise to the level of materiality, and thus does not justify litigation. We typically do not rely to any substantial detriment on the accuracy of an expressive work's description, after all. If we like a work, we like it, regardless of its source. Misdescriptions of authorship can trick us into buying the wrong expressions, however. You might, for instance, buy tickets to a Djelimady Tounkara concert only to find another, lesser guitarist on stage. That would naturally rouse your indignation.
We don't need copyrights to vindicate that sort of wrong, however; common law and various state and federal statutes already afford many remedies for it. Consumers of misleadingly labeled goods or services can plead fraud under tort law and breach or promissory estoppel under contract law. The licensee of a materially misdescribed work would enjoy a strong contract law defense, one voiding any agreement alleged by the licensor publisher. An author who sees her work sold under another's name would, as a wronged competitor, have standing to sue for unfair competition under state or federal law. The publisher of such an author might likewise enjoy legal and equitable remedies for passing off. The Federal Trade Commission and its many state counterparts can protect consumers and competitors of falsely labeled expressive works, while various federal and state executive officers can fight such wrongs with the criminal sanctions levied against the many guises of fraud.
Those legal tools give us ample ways to discourage materially harmful misdescriptions of expressive works. We don't need copyright to satisfy our moral intuitions on that front, and most people's condemnations against unauthorized copying don't go much beyond harmful lying. If you make an unauthorized copy of a CD and give it as a gift to your friend, for instance, do you feel guilty of committing a moral wrong? Probably not—even though you would probably thereby have committed copyright infringement. You can admit to breaking the law in such a case without admitting to violating a natural right. Thus does a good driver on an empty road speed with a clear conscience. We recognize copying limits, like speed limits, as legislation designed to maximize social utility, created by statute for presumptively good reasons and thus, unless manifestly inefficient or inequitable, enjoying some claim to our obedience. We follow such laws out of habit, conformism, or fear—not because they protect natural rights.
So go the moral intuitions of most folks. Authors, admittedly, sometimes express profound outrage that unauthorized copying, even when it gives credit where due, equates to theft. Their understandable pique does not, however, establish a natural copyright right. The non-rivalrousness of expressive works means that copying does not hinder the use or enjoyment of anyone's copy. A painter fully owns his canvas even if another photographs it without his permission, for instance. What authors care about in such instances is not the use and enjoyment of their works, but rather their lost copyright revenues.
Copyright can provide authors with revenue, a benefit that infringement threatens to reduce. Authors thus naturally feel disappointment and anger when their works suffer unauthorized use. But that hardly shows that copyright infringement violates a natural right. It only shows that authors, like almost everyone else, prefer more money to less. There can be no copyright infringement absent copyright protection. Only by circular reasoning, then, can the complaint that infringement reduces authors' revenues justify copyright.
Why would copyright holders choose to abandon their statutory rights and rely solely on their common law ones? A few "blockheaded" authors might do so non-monetary reasons, of course. Thanks to the combined effect of copyright misuse and § 505 of the Copyright Act, however, even crassly profit-maximizing copyright holders might find abandonment financially attractive.
Under § 505, courts may in their discretion award attorney's fees to the prevailing party in copyright litigation. The Supreme Court has interpreted that provision to benefit copyright plaintiffs and defendants alike. The Court suggested that, among other factors, courts should base an award of attorney's fees under § 505 on "'frivolousness, motivation, objective unreasonableness (both in the factual and in the legal components of the case) and the need in particular circumstances to advance considerations of compensation and deterrence.'" Those factors could easily describe a typical case of copyright misuse. Not surprisingly, then, courts have found that defendants who suffered copyright misuse—or even something less than misuse—deserve an award of attorney's fees under § 505.
Common law, like U.S. law generally, takes a very different approach to attorney's fees. Under the so-called "American Rule," each party in civil litigation—even the winner—must pay for its own legal representation. Section 505 of the Copyright Act represents a rare and notable exception to that rule.
Here, then, the common law treats authors better than copyright law does. The Copyright Act offers many benefits to copyright holders, of course, such as strict liability and statutory damages. Overzealous copyright holders might find that the doctrine of misuse denies those benefits, however, and that § 505 imposes the costs of paying for an opposing party's attorney. For some copyright holders, those combined effects might suffice to render abandonment a financially attractive option. That would hold especially true if copyright holders could count on their common law rights to survive abandonment and if entrepreneurs continue to develop private alternatives to the statutory protection of expressive works.
Hello from 2027! The future has been going great. I really enjoy it, and I think you'll like it here, too.
Things have improved a lot since 2007. We've generally grown more healthy, wealthy, free, and (I daresay) happy. There remain rough spots, of course: Climate regulation, zombie flu, the still-unfinished meteorite prevention belt . . . and the future didn't work out too well for everyone. Some wonderful people didn't make it, sad to say, while others remain in suspension. As they say in aircar ads, "your mileage may vary. " All in all, though, the future remains very bright.
I remember back when I lived in 2007. I looked forward to the future, and foresaw pretty good stuff. That prediction turned out ok, but I have to admit that I missed a lot of details! Who would have guessed the 2015 Constitutional Convention? That one really caught me by surprise.
Copyright of a sort still exists, but it doesn't seem to matter as much as it used to. I still read about lawsuits getting filed, once and a while, but they almost always settle. Thanks to a decision from your era—eBay v. MercExchange—courts hardly ever issue copyright injunctions, anymore. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the same equitable standards generally applicable in civil cases apply likewise to patent infringement claims. Courts thereafter stopped enjoining patent infringement as a matter of course. Thanks to a logical extension of eBay, that same rule has long also applied to copyright infringement claims.
Pirates still face injunctions and stiff fines for fraudulently selling unauthorized copies as the real thing. The rest of us, though, largely ignore copyright. We have lots of access to expressive works, and we use them pretty much as we like. Granted, we sometimes buy early access to fresh works. A new book or song doesn't cost much, though. It has to compete, after all, with the vast amount of authorship each of can tap just by jacking into the Hive.
These days, our good old common law rights, joined with new technologies, "promote the general welfare" and "the progress of science and useful arts" (to quote version 1.0 of the U.S. Constitution). Property and tort law protect authors' voices, pens, and presses during the creation and distribution of expressive works. "Smart contracts" (something that Nick Szabo predicted in the 1990s), allow authors and publishers to exercise some control over what happens to publicly-distributed works.
Common law does not protect works of authorship perfectly, but it protects them well enough. New releases get decoded pretty quickly, and eventually fall out of privity and into the public domain. Most authors and publishers (in many cases, thanks to plummeting costs, the same party) thus release their works in as many open formats as they can. Recompense comes in the form of gifts and friends.
That might not sound like a very lucrative scheme, to you, but we have plenty (some say too many) of super-stars who earn (and usually waste) huge sums of money entertaining the masses. They owe some of their success to their ridiculous hair, granted, but even I like Spectacle's latest hit song. Even though they made a fair penny selling encrypted copies of it, they will make much, much more touring. I hear that they sold over 78,000 front row tickets to their google-res show in 3rd Life. With over 10 billion very wired people on Earth, and over 6 billion more in near space, it doesn't take a very big market share for an author to make very big profits.
All in all, I think you will really like 2027. Of course, we have hard-working folks like you to thank for creating the wonderful world we now live in. Thank you very much for safeguarding the common law. The collective wisdom of its time-tested rules continues to serve us well. By defending your rights to person, property, and promise, you protected ours, too. Keep up the good work!
Copyright law regulates expression. Through it, copyright holders win the privilege of invoking state power to control how and what we communicate. The Copyright Act limits our freedom to reproduce, rework, publicly distribute, publicly perform, or publicly display protected works of authorship. In many cases, even when the Act does not utterly prohibit an expression, the Copyright Office sets its price. Copyright flows top-down, out of Washington, D.C., in detailed and non-negotiable terms.
Common law operates on very different principles. It grows bottom up, out of the decisions of manifold state courts, without relying on federal lawmakers, statutes, or administrative agencies. It follows a few simple principles, leaving details to particular cases, customary practices, and mutual consent. Common law thus offers a deregulatory alternative to copyright.
Should we seize that opportunity? Simple logic suggests the appeal of winning the benefits of copyright policy (access to authors' works) without incurring its costs (lost opportunities to use those works). The Constitution goes further; it demands that we abandon copyright if we discover better policy options. If copyright is not necessary and proper to promote the general welfare and progress in the useful arts and sciences, after all, it loses its sole justification.
Common law alone evidently suffices to stimulate some original expressions, to some degree. Consider perfumes, recipes, clothes designs, furniture, car bodies, and uninhabited architectural structures—all of which exhibit great innovation despite falling outside the scope of copyright, patent, or any like statutory privilege. Perhaps common law could do still more if pressed into service more widely. Perhaps its fundamental principles of contract, property, and tort law could stimulate original expressive works even better than copyright can. Only by trying can we know.
We should thus promote policy experiments testing whether common law suffices to produce a socially optimal amount of expression. Copyright holders could help drive that discovery process by abandoning their statutory privileges. To encourage their participation, we should legislatively guarantee copyright holders that they will retain common law rights in works they dedicate to the public domain. That alone would probably not convince many copyright holders to abandon their statutory privileges, granted. Because it frees them from liability for opposing parties' attorneys' fees, however, abandonment already offers copyright holders a financial benefit. Clarifying that copyright abandonment leaves common law rights unaffected would strengthen that incentive.
Should we favor common law or a federal statute when it comes to controlling the creation, dissemination, and use of expressions? Commentators and courts largely agree on how to answer this question in First Amendment context. No such consensus exists in the context of copyright, however. Indeed, scarcely anyone even asks the question in those terms. We should not only ask it, but answer it: "favor common law over copyright."

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