Blogs you should be reading: Matt Rolls a Hoover

Matt Morse has a couple of excellent posts from the past few days that deserve to be read and re-read, talked about around dinner tables, and generally praised in an exaggerated and possibly embarrassing manner.

In the latest, he makes an argument that I wish I could convert into liquid form and pour down Jack Valenti’s throat:

My point is that pay per copy model is based on physical distribution. Digital distribution requires a different model. I don’t know if that’s patronage or auction or goodwill or general taxes that get redistributed to programmers based on some measure of their productivity or all software development becomes part of another job description, but the model of charging for physical objects doesn’t work when there’s no physical object. Obviously, the same applies to music (and ebooks, if they ever gain any popularity).

New business models have different implications for copyright. The response of the music and movie industries has been to try to make digital information behave like physical objects, modify copyright law to make that easier, and keep using the same business model. While there is a certain logic to this (from their perspective anyway), it’s utterly backward.

This isn’t a new argument, but saying it the way he has makes things much more clear to the uninitiated than the usual formulations (“intellectual property is non-rivalrous”). And applying it to software development gives us paid nerds a morally-useful chance to eat our own rhetorical dogfood: software is bits; if you get paid for writing software, do you think your non-rivalrous bits are more special, and should be less freely copied, than Britney Spears’ non-rivalrous bits? Are you willing to put your paycheck where your MP3 is?

The day before, while lamenting the death of the composer Luciano Berio, Matt makes a simple and beautiful case for why we IP non-absolutists are IP non-absolutists. Hint: it’s got nothing to do with downloading bootleg copies of Matrix Reloaded from bittorrent.

Creativity depends on past creations. If Haydn had been able to copyright the sonata form in the 18th century, Schubert could not have written the music he did in the 19th century, and Berio would not have had the source for his music in the 20th century. Placing limits on copyright isn’t about theft or getting the results of someone else’s labor for free. It’s about encouraging and rewarding creativity.

This time, without irony: Indeed.

Filed under: copyright