Greg Stepanich

Copyright and creation

Here’s a dispatch from Cannes, courtesy of London’s Independent newspaper, in which the proper monetizing of musical content was the subject of a keynote address by the U2 manager Paul McGuinness.

McGuinness argues that it’s the Internet service providers and the makers of devices such as the iPod that should be coughing up some more cash to the creators: “Our talented clients deserve better than the shoddy and careless way they’ve been treated in the digital age.”

It’s an interesting premise, and it serves as a salutary reminder that in the current Net-laden transformation of the global economy, some key questions have not yet been resolved. It could be argued that it is the Googles and the Apples who have been making the most money from this transformation, and that the rest of the world is in the position of being humble contributor or equally humble consumer.

And then again, the average person is also in the position of profiting from the content their technology makes available (as in the links and everything else made available in every blog everywhere). Right now, and actually for some years (here’s a link to a piece about blogs in the new New York Review of Books), the move to the Net has been a giant free-for-all in the sense of adoption, but in the process some things have been overlooked.

You can’t ask creative people over and over again to let their work go out into the world and not be compensated for it. It’s exciting at first when people like it, and want to read it, or hear it, or see it, or dance to it, but after a while, the artist needs to make some scratch. And since the idea of controlling a revenue stream by the exercise of copyright is semi-obsolete when copies can be generated instantly and ad infinitum by anyone with a computer, it’s time for the nations of the world to get together again and come up with new rules. (The TRIPS agreement of 1994 is the most recent effort, it appears; here’s a Wikipedia entry.)

I’ve advocated before a BBC-style licensing system, in which everyone who buys a computer, cellphone or iPod would have to pay a small tax that would go to a global royalty agency that would disburse cash to creators or copyright owners who could demonstrate legitimately that their creations had been used elsewhere.

With the scale of reproduction everywhere, it’d be just about impossible to pay for every use, but perhaps some token royalty could be paid in those cases (I’m thinking here of, say, a million blogs that choose to comment some week on a major newsmaker such as Hillary Clinton, and most of them use the same pic).

Such a system — for which I make no claim of having done detailed research — would undoubtedly be imperfect and in some ways inadequate. But perhaps it would have the benefit of forestalling litigation, and it would at the very least enshrine the idea of paying the artist.

I’m not poor-mouthing all the musicians and writers here; plenty of them are making money from things they way they are now. But in a very short time, traditional distribution networks are going to be overridden by personal technology access, and something needs to be in place so that the financial incentive to keep creators creating is alive and well.