A PBS transcript lays out some of the issues to be discussed in Copyright in America. It’s apparently complements or is from part of the NOW–with Bill Moyers show that will air tonight at 9 EST on many PBS stations.
Not too much new here from Pat Schroeder, the child-welfare advocate turned publishing lobbyist–who at one time was on a rather vocal jihad against librarians over the fair use issue (and continues to distort the facts even if she is more polite about it). “Now, if suddenly you say when a library buys one digital copy they can then give it to the world and they can go out and make their own copy,” Schroeder says, “we can visualize a world where you would sell one digital copy and that would be it.”
What a crock. Via a TeleRead-style approach, a national digital library system could pay publishers by the number of accesses. Yes, for the sake of sane budgets, there might be caps on these payments. But megapublishers could gamble up front, and along the way, to increase the caps. It’s what’s known as investment–except it would be in higher caps rather than in ink and paper. Capitalism, anyone? Another tack possible under TeleRead would be to offer decreasing royalty rates on megasales rather than the increasing ones in the world of paper publishing. The economics are different. Bits are much cheaper to move around than paper and ink, and the publishing system should adjust in the name of fairness. That $1M+ advance due Clarence Thomas–er, yes, the oh-so-detached Justice, the same guy who voted for copyright extension–is the equivalent of upfront payments on more than 100 first novels.
But back to the PBS transcript. While Schroeder and fellow copyright zealot Jack Valenti make their appearances, as they should, if the show is to be balanced, the program also offers excellent analysis from fair-use advocates. Eben Moglen, a copyright expert at Columbia University, paints a dark picture of the threat from the copyright lobby and what it could mean to the average American. “She can get an E-book delivered to her pocket, the newest Robert Ludlum novel,” Moglen says. “And it will be there until she’s read it once or twice or five times. But she can’t lend it to anybody. She can’t even print a page of it on a photocopier to show somebody to say, ‘Here, you’d really love this novel.’
“And not only d– has she lost rights that we take for granted, to make a private copy, to share, she’s also lost privacy, because somebody knows about everything she reads and everything she watches and everything she listens to.
“I call this giving people everything they want without letting them keep it. And it seems to me a pretty insidious form of culture.
“It adds up to media companies controlling what you do and how you access culture. And it’s already happening.”
For example, as PBS’s Rick Karr points out, even today you may not be able fast-forward through the commercials at the start of DVDs. Yes, the copycrats want control.
Meanwhile a message to PBS: Is this transcript new? The transcript page on the Web bears the phrase “Tollbooths on the Information Superhighway,” a different title from “Copyright in America,” and those are rather familiar words. Just wonderin’ if you’ve already aired a segment like this. Apparently not, since I don’t see a date other than January 17–so I’ll assume that the transcript is from part of “Copyright in America.” Oh, well, judging from the thoroughness with which the copyright industry has bribed Congress with campaign donations, the “Tollbooths” title will work out for a long time. Feel free to recycle.
