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Copy Right: LexisNexis, Copyright and
the Search for Today's Most "Useful Arts" |
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29 August 2005 |
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The LexisNexis announcement of its sophisticated and
powerful CopyGuard service is meant to send shivers down
the spines of copyright violators. But its ability to
compare works for suspicious similarities is more likely to
protect publishers from plagiarism problems with its own
staffs than to reap any revenues from content snatchers
caught in the act. The problems of copyright law have far
less to do with inadequate enforcement of outdated
regulations than they do with technology that makes copying
itself hard to avoid, much less control. Publishers need to
focus more on copyright enforcement that enables users to
get more value once they've received copies of content than
on trying to control the copying process itself. |
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When
replicating content was an art in the hands of monks and
scribes there wasn't a lot of fuss about intellectual property
rights. But when the copying science of Guttenberg's printing
press created the potential for fortunes independent of land
and physical labor, the concept of intellectual property was
born. It was important enough an economic driver to have its
protection enshrined in the first article of the
U.S. Constitution. The wording of the germane clause extols
"the progress of science and useful arts" as the underpinnings
of intellectual property rights - not the least of which was
the burgeoning art (and business) of publishing, protected by
copyright laws governing presses.
But ubiquitous and instant global
electronic publishing has devalued the market for copied
content, unloosing copyright law from its historical moorings.
It's actually hard NOT to make copies of electronic content (if
you're looking at this article online, your browser's caching
function just copied a copyrighted work). Enter
LexisNexis into the picture with its
new CopyGuard service designed to track down copyright
violators. CopyGuard was developed with technology from
iParadigms,
a company responsible for the highly popular
Turnitin
system that helps academics identify plagiarism. For LexisNexis
the iParadigms team has turned their technology loose on the
copyrighted content in LexisNexis databases and open Web
content to build a database of 6.1 billion documents.
Suspiciously similar documents submitted to the service are
quickly identified. This is a boon for the legal departments of
publishers trying to keep up with global content reuse, to be
sure, but LexisNexis also positions the product to "help our
customers protect themselves against this growing threat."
Against whose threat, the question may be asked? Publishers
have little desire to go after illicit corporate content reuse
under current laws and prosecutions in developing nations such
as China and Myanmar will proceed slowly, if at all, using such
a tool. The continuing prosecution of individual music
downloaders by the RIAA has
not stemmed song downloads but instead has been made largely
moot by the popularity and profitability of convenient legal
downloads. So in CopyGuard we have a great tool that can help
to protect a few organizations that can leverage governments
and markets. But it will do little to address the fundamental
problem with copyright enforcement: copyright laws no longer
protect the most important ways in which people make money with
content.
With the exception of highly sensitive and valuable state,
institutional and personal secrets limiting content
distribution is no longer a sensible financial goal. Instead,
allowing content to flow as quickly as possible to as many
places in which it will be considered valuable has become far
more efficient for monetization by allowing the consumers of
that content to determine its usefulness. The business of
publishing is less and less about pushing things from
professional authors out the door to a marketplace and more and
more about what that marketplace does with things from amateur
and professional authors once they get them. This is still
consistent with the U.S. Constitutional perspective on
intellectual property: it indicates that authors and inventors
have rights, as long as their products are progressing science
and "useful arts." Distribution control itself is not a right.
If their products' lack of availability hinders progress,
science and useful activities that are of importance to a
greater good, then an author's rights are in question.
Tools such as CopyGuard can help publishers to identify
users of copyrighted content but there's much more money to be
made in transforming those users into customers than to heckle
them for using common and largely legal technology. The concept
of copyright enforcement is behind the times. It has to change
from a legal construct restricting distribution to a tool that
enables more complete and creative consumption of
already-distributed content. Here are a few simple (but perhaps
painful) steps that publishers should accelerate if they are to
maintain the long-term value of copyrights:
- Adopt a single, global and relatively short time
period for legal protection of copyrighted materials.
U.S. publishers and media companies have backed themselves
into a corner by pushing through domestic laws extending the
length and scope of copyrights well beyond the limits that
are practical in a global electronic economy. This
addicts them to intellectual property that does not create
progress, as the U.S. Constitution suggests. A simple global
standard for protecting intellectual property rights for a
relatively short duration will be more likely to create
universal compliance that can free all nations to prove
themselves in a fair marketplace of new ideas.
- Devise a global copyright registry that ensures fast
and fair management of ALL authors' rights. Registries
could be distributed, as they are with the nascent
Digital Object
Identifier (DOI) system. But with user-generated media
now dwarfing professionally-published materials the
"progress" envisioned in the U.S. Constitution is in the
hands of many more individuals and institutions than
currently handled by DOI. Tools such as LexisNexis CopyGuard
could be used to ensure with some degree of automation that a
work was truly original before assigning a registration ID to
a work, helping to speed the commercialization and legal
repurposing of content from all sources significantly.
- Deploy open standards for managing copyrighted
content. With a standard identifier for digital content
objects the commercialization of content based on use rather
than distribution becomes practical. Sun's recently announced
Open Media Commons initiative leveraging the
platform-independent
Opera DRM scheme may be a fledgling step in this
direction. But the real need is for content objects to be
able to present themselves in different packaging to
different people automatically based on different licensing
schemes, thus promoting distribution at the user level while
maintaining intellectual rights.
Identifying content re-use is critical to the future economic
success of publishing but it's not an aberration to be
strangled in laws based on the constraints of 18th century
technology. Fortunately the framers of the U.S. Constitution
did not focus on technology. They saw that the primary issue
was a human issue: rewarding people who help to create a better
world. If publishers can keep that same historic focus there
may yet be a bright future for copyrighted content.
-
John Blossom
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