June 4, 2010 at 19:03Learning to live without copyright
The use of torrents has become widespread. The pirates have created around themselves a very stable business model, which so far does not think to become obsolete. Of course, copyright holders are actively trying to fight this, but with all these lawsuits and penalizing users they are unlikely to win people's love, and after all, customer loyalty is one of the most important components of the commercial success of intellectual creations.
It is important to understand one simple thing - at the moment there are no completely reliable and guaranteeing success ways to protect copyright and prevent the free distribution of products. No matter how frighten the people, no matter how you negotiate with providers, which DRM you don’t put, anyway even an inexperienced Internet user can easily find a “secure” product on the network.
Perhaps for copyright holders, the best solution in this difficult situation is not to search for new technical and legal methods to protect their precious work, but to make it possible for free distribution, due to which they are now losing money, on the contrary, creating the possibility of making money. In other words, recalling Lincoln's famous dictum, the best way to defeat the enemy is to turn him into a friend.
So, in this after I wanted to list, speaking in a formal language, all possible alternative cost-recovery mechanisms for creating intelligent products that I know of. In this blog, respected habrayuzers have discussed this topic many times, but so far no one has taken the trouble to summarize all the arguments and facts. I will try to tackle this.
Dean of the Faculty of Economics, University of St. Louis, Michele Boldrin, wrote the book Against Intellectual Monopoly, which described the ideal copyright system. According to Boldrin, copyright protection should last a maximum of three years. He explains this idea by the fact that basically the creators of intellectual property (OIP) receive money from this IP in the first six months, a year, a maximum of two or three years from the start of sales (this is really so: in the book business the first three weeks after the premiere of the new books bring 70-90% of the total revenue from the book; the same, but to a lesser extent applies to the cinema and the music industry). After this time, when the main demand for IPOs is saturated, there remain only varying degrees of success of the publisher’s attempt to earn money on the wave of old success. Thus, the main advantage of the author for the first time will be the "advantage of the first move."
Boldrin as an example of a working model already leadspornography industry. The distribution system there is approximately the following: pornographic film studios make films and post them on their own sites exclusively in paid access. Studio fans and other impatient customers pay for the viewing, and this happens for several weeks. Finally, having collected all the cream, film studios post these pictures in free access on special video services, luring new customers and taming them to their brand. Then everything repeats all over again. In this particular industry, copyright is not very strictly enforced, but this does not prevent movie studios and video services from flourishing. By analogy, Boldrin proposes to introduce a similar system in other sectors of RID (results of intellectual activity). And now there really are similar solutions, especially in the journalistic sphere. For instance, Expert Russian magazine recently introduced paid access to many fresh articles on its website; but after a few weeks this restriction is removed and the article becomes available for free. Musicians also begin to adhere to a similar scheme: Zemfira recentlybegan to distribute their albums on their own site.
The following model was introduced for discussion on Habr by the user nForce . Its concept is simple: the music industry forms a community, which then offers lovers of free music exchange the opportunity to legally exchange it for a moderate regular fee, say, $ 5 per month. As long as these people pay, they can continue to do what they will do anyway - change the music they like, using any software they like on the platform they prefer - without fear that they break law. Received money is divided between copyright holders, based on the popularity of their music.
In exchange, music-sharing enthusiasts are free to download whatever they like using any program that works better than others. The more people participate in the exchange, the more money goes to copyright holders. The stronger the competition between data exchange programs, the faster innovations and improvements appear. The more people are given the freedom to lay out what they like, the wider the catalog. This model was supported by EFF.
An interesting system, but it’s not entirely clear how to stimulate bittorrent users to download in exactly the same way, but for money. Not everyone will be attracted to the mere realization that the content they are distributing to each other is completely legal.
Chris Andersen, editor-in-chief of the cult magazine Wired, recently wrote the book , Free: The Future of a Radical Price . In it, he extols the model of "business with free distribution" as a kind of higher form of economy. Indeed, almost the entire Internet is built on this — free media, free mail, free search, and so on. Some computer game developers distribute the first part of the game for free, creating an army of fans, and already sells the remaining parts. Or, for example, you can distribute a certain product completely free of charge, and its perfect complement - for the money (printer and cartridges, machine and blades, 3D glasses and the movie "Avatar" and so on).
This idea was expressed by the user DileSoft . If all paid information is distributed via the Internet, it will kill piracy. Why? The fact is that, for example, we will never see pirated Gmail, because Gmail and all other Google services are not installed on the computer, they work on remote servers. The same goes for other online programs and even online games. If all media activities are transferred to the browser screen - books, films, music - and stored not on users' hard drives, but in the server rooms of large companies, then the pirates will not have any maneuvers, since they will need their own servers and non-child ones to create comparable copies power, and to create a copy with the same cost as the original, the pirate does not make sense.
User stasmat suggesteda model called "Street Performer Protocol." In this model, the author announces that he will give his work (book, music, video, program) for free access after receiving a certain amount. Those who are interested in this material transfer funds to the author’s account with some reliable intermediary. With the accumulation of the required amount, money is transferred to the author, and the work is in the public domain. If the amount could not be collected for a certain time, then the money is returned to the payers. And what about the author - his business. It is understood that the author has some kind of reputation. If he has already established himself as a good creator, then from time to time he can set the price higher, more and more people will pay him and more and more willingly. You can build a positive (or negative) reputation, for example,
In this system, one can feel injustice in the sense that some people will pay the author, and everyone will get access. In this case, you can enter the initial access only to paying people, and share it after a certain time. Thus, non-payers will receive less relevant material than those who spent the money. Other methods of encouraging payers are also possible.
This idea is somewhat similar to Boldrin’s short-term copyright, but the latter is best used in the music field (since it spins a lot of money around concert performances, and musicians will not care about sales), and the “street musician protocol” can become quite viable in the book industry (since for the writer the fee is the most important income).
This system, when they offer to pay any positive amount for a product, is introduced into various projects from time to time, and it often brings surprises. It’s enough to recall the RadioHead album, which collected more than two million dollars in this way, which is surprising in itself, because users had the opportunity to choose a price of one cent. Recently conducted a similar experimentWolfire Games on its website, following the same pattern by offering customers an indie game package. For the first week of the campaign, 98,000 people downloaded the package and donated $ 869,000 in total. Of course, the average billable amount barely exceeds $ 8, which is 10 times less than the total cost of the games included in the package. However, due to the total number of buyers, the costs can be offset by the turnover, not to mention the advertising hype caused by this action.
This system is similar to the previous one, but here the buyer pays for the IP product, already knowing about its quality. The product is distributed by any means, but the buyer always has the opportunity to donate part of his funds to the author. It turns out that this method is more fair in relation to the authors, since ideally the author will get the most money, the work of which people liked most. But in practice, such a system is not very effective, since consumers have no economic incentive to make donations: after all, they have already received utility from the IPO, and in this case they can be guided solely by conscience and natural kindness. Now on the Internet, such a system exists among many authors as a spare, but, as practice shows, such methods of rewarding author's work bring very funny crumbs.
It sounds paradoxical, but the idea is quite simple and clear, and I picked it up from Lehi Andreev. Content will be distributed free and free, there will be no restrictions. But there will always be people who insert this content on their site without a link to the source and without the author’s name, and besides, they will hang various advertising banners around it for monetization. It is such individuals that should be sought and fined, and it is these fines that will be distributed among the authors of the original content. In other words, this system does not interfere with free distribution, but takes money from pirates and plagiarists who want to cash in on someone else's work. Such a decision, in my opinion, is ideal for journalistic articles.
One of the manifestations of this method of stimulating authors is the tax on blank CDs, which is likely to be introduced in our country soon. The meaning of this tax is that usually with the help of such discs it is the copyrighted files that are distributed, and for such distribution of products you need to share money. In fact, this is a tax on the whole society, which after the collection is planned to be divided between the copyright holders. But, firstly, in this particular case, all the income will be taken away by RAO, which is far from all Russian authors. From this we can already conclude that the funds will be distributed among the authors irrationally. Secondly, recordable and rewritable compact discs are already rapidly falling out of use, and tax revenues from them will be incommensurable with the volume of file sharing via the Internet.
Now in Russia and abroad, a whole series of start-ups is opening up - video services working on advertising contributions. Of the latest Russian examples, ivi.ru and zoomby.ru are sites. It’s not very important for the viewer whether to watch a couple of commercials or not, but a legal site can provide exclusive materials, better image quality and the timely appearance of new materials. The only problem is that the leadership of the video portal for competitiveness with pirated resources needs to agree with a large number of copyright holders, because a small amount of video content will reduce all investments and promotion to nothing. Unfortunately, while modern Russian video services cannot boast a large assortment of films and series.
A similar system can be used not only in the field of video, but also in the musical field (Internet radio) or in the literary and journalistic field.
This idea is somewhat aloof from the rest, but it is also important in understanding the problems of copyright infringement. Why is piracy so popular? Is it really only about money? Most of the people polled by the author of this post said that if paying for digital content was as simple as simply inserting a bill into a computer, they would have bought most of the programs, music and films without hesitation. In order to buy, for example, a computer program, you need to either leave your home and go to the nearest electronics store, or deal with bank cards, money orders, serial codes, license agreements, and so on. In this sense, buying a pirated version is much more reasonable - it saves not only money, but also time with nerves.
Therefore, an important task for the copyright holder is to build an extremely simple connection between the consumer and the product, make the payment quick and easy, and service maintenance - prompt and enjoyable. It was not for nothing that the EU recently announced a five-year plan for the development of IT and telecommunications, where a special role was assigned to the development of legal music services and the formation of a single market for digital services and goods.
If the owner of the copyright still loses money, let him try to return it through related areas: for example, in the case of the music industry, through frequent concert tours with good organization and cheap tickets, which is so rare for Russian reality (and not only Russian).
Which of these methods do you think are the most effective? Which of them have the future? What are their advantages and disadvantages over each other?
What is better suited for cinema, what for music, and what for books?
Can you add some more items to this list?
I would be grateful for any interesting thoughts on the topic.
It is important to understand one simple thing - at the moment there are no completely reliable and guaranteeing success ways to protect copyright and prevent the free distribution of products. No matter how frighten the people, no matter how you negotiate with providers, which DRM you don’t put, anyway even an inexperienced Internet user can easily find a “secure” product on the network.
Perhaps for copyright holders, the best solution in this difficult situation is not to search for new technical and legal methods to protect their precious work, but to make it possible for free distribution, due to which they are now losing money, on the contrary, creating the possibility of making money. In other words, recalling Lincoln's famous dictum, the best way to defeat the enemy is to turn him into a friend.
So, in this after I wanted to list, speaking in a formal language, all possible alternative cost-recovery mechanisms for creating intelligent products that I know of. In this blog, respected habrayuzers have discussed this topic many times, but so far no one has taken the trouble to summarize all the arguments and facts. I will try to tackle this.
Short term copyright
Dean of the Faculty of Economics, University of St. Louis, Michele Boldrin, wrote the book Against Intellectual Monopoly, which described the ideal copyright system. According to Boldrin, copyright protection should last a maximum of three years. He explains this idea by the fact that basically the creators of intellectual property (OIP) receive money from this IP in the first six months, a year, a maximum of two or three years from the start of sales (this is really so: in the book business the first three weeks after the premiere of the new books bring 70-90% of the total revenue from the book; the same, but to a lesser extent applies to the cinema and the music industry). After this time, when the main demand for IPOs is saturated, there remain only varying degrees of success of the publisher’s attempt to earn money on the wave of old success. Thus, the main advantage of the author for the first time will be the "advantage of the first move."
Boldrin as an example of a working model already leadspornography industry. The distribution system there is approximately the following: pornographic film studios make films and post them on their own sites exclusively in paid access. Studio fans and other impatient customers pay for the viewing, and this happens for several weeks. Finally, having collected all the cream, film studios post these pictures in free access on special video services, luring new customers and taming them to their brand. Then everything repeats all over again. In this particular industry, copyright is not very strictly enforced, but this does not prevent movie studios and video services from flourishing. By analogy, Boldrin proposes to introduce a similar system in other sectors of RID (results of intellectual activity). And now there really are similar solutions, especially in the journalistic sphere. For instance, Expert Russian magazine recently introduced paid access to many fresh articles on its website; but after a few weeks this restriction is removed and the article becomes available for free. Musicians also begin to adhere to a similar scheme: Zemfira recentlybegan to distribute their albums on their own site.
Exchange for money
The following model was introduced for discussion on Habr by the user nForce . Its concept is simple: the music industry forms a community, which then offers lovers of free music exchange the opportunity to legally exchange it for a moderate regular fee, say, $ 5 per month. As long as these people pay, they can continue to do what they will do anyway - change the music they like, using any software they like on the platform they prefer - without fear that they break law. Received money is divided between copyright holders, based on the popularity of their music.
In exchange, music-sharing enthusiasts are free to download whatever they like using any program that works better than others. The more people participate in the exchange, the more money goes to copyright holders. The stronger the competition between data exchange programs, the faster innovations and improvements appear. The more people are given the freedom to lay out what they like, the wider the catalog. This model was supported by EFF.
An interesting system, but it’s not entirely clear how to stimulate bittorrent users to download in exactly the same way, but for money. Not everyone will be attracted to the mere realization that the content they are distributing to each other is completely legal.
Freeconomics
Chris Andersen, editor-in-chief of the cult magazine Wired, recently wrote the book , Free: The Future of a Radical Price . In it, he extols the model of "business with free distribution" as a kind of higher form of economy. Indeed, almost the entire Internet is built on this — free media, free mail, free search, and so on. Some computer game developers distribute the first part of the game for free, creating an army of fans, and already sells the remaining parts. Or, for example, you can distribute a certain product completely free of charge, and its perfect complement - for the money (printer and cartridges, machine and blades, 3D glasses and the movie "Avatar" and so on).
Cloud Services
This idea was expressed by the user DileSoft . If all paid information is distributed via the Internet, it will kill piracy. Why? The fact is that, for example, we will never see pirated Gmail, because Gmail and all other Google services are not installed on the computer, they work on remote servers. The same goes for other online programs and even online games. If all media activities are transferred to the browser screen - books, films, music - and stored not on users' hard drives, but in the server rooms of large companies, then the pirates will not have any maneuvers, since they will need their own servers and non-child ones to create comparable copies power, and to create a copy with the same cost as the original, the pirate does not make sense.
"Protocol of a street musician"
User stasmat suggesteda model called "Street Performer Protocol." In this model, the author announces that he will give his work (book, music, video, program) for free access after receiving a certain amount. Those who are interested in this material transfer funds to the author’s account with some reliable intermediary. With the accumulation of the required amount, money is transferred to the author, and the work is in the public domain. If the amount could not be collected for a certain time, then the money is returned to the payers. And what about the author - his business. It is understood that the author has some kind of reputation. If he has already established himself as a good creator, then from time to time he can set the price higher, more and more people will pay him and more and more willingly. You can build a positive (or negative) reputation, for example,
In this system, one can feel injustice in the sense that some people will pay the author, and everyone will get access. In this case, you can enter the initial access only to paying people, and share it after a certain time. Thus, non-payers will receive less relevant material than those who spent the money. Other methods of encouraging payers are also possible.
This idea is somewhat similar to Boldrin’s short-term copyright, but the latter is best used in the music field (since it spins a lot of money around concert performances, and musicians will not care about sales), and the “street musician protocol” can become quite viable in the book industry (since for the writer the fee is the most important income).
Pay as you want system
This system, when they offer to pay any positive amount for a product, is introduced into various projects from time to time, and it often brings surprises. It’s enough to recall the RadioHead album, which collected more than two million dollars in this way, which is surprising in itself, because users had the opportunity to choose a price of one cent. Recently conducted a similar experimentWolfire Games on its website, following the same pattern by offering customers an indie game package. For the first week of the campaign, 98,000 people downloaded the package and donated $ 869,000 in total. Of course, the average billable amount barely exceeds $ 8, which is 10 times less than the total cost of the games included in the package. However, due to the total number of buyers, the costs can be offset by the turnover, not to mention the advertising hype caused by this action.
Post-payment system
This system is similar to the previous one, but here the buyer pays for the IP product, already knowing about its quality. The product is distributed by any means, but the buyer always has the opportunity to donate part of his funds to the author. It turns out that this method is more fair in relation to the authors, since ideally the author will get the most money, the work of which people liked most. But in practice, such a system is not very effective, since consumers have no economic incentive to make donations: after all, they have already received utility from the IPO, and in this case they can be guided solely by conscience and natural kindness. Now on the Internet, such a system exists among many authors as a spare, but, as practice shows, such methods of rewarding author's work bring very funny crumbs.
Copyright to protect free distribution
It sounds paradoxical, but the idea is quite simple and clear, and I picked it up from Lehi Andreev. Content will be distributed free and free, there will be no restrictions. But there will always be people who insert this content on their site without a link to the source and without the author’s name, and besides, they will hang various advertising banners around it for monetization. It is such individuals that should be sought and fined, and it is these fines that will be distributed among the authors of the original content. In other words, this system does not interfere with free distribution, but takes money from pirates and plagiarists who want to cash in on someone else's work. Such a decision, in my opinion, is ideal for journalistic articles.
Public sponsorship
One of the manifestations of this method of stimulating authors is the tax on blank CDs, which is likely to be introduced in our country soon. The meaning of this tax is that usually with the help of such discs it is the copyrighted files that are distributed, and for such distribution of products you need to share money. In fact, this is a tax on the whole society, which after the collection is planned to be divided between the copyright holders. But, firstly, in this particular case, all the income will be taken away by RAO, which is far from all Russian authors. From this we can already conclude that the funds will be distributed among the authors irrationally. Secondly, recordable and rewritable compact discs are already rapidly falling out of use, and tax revenues from them will be incommensurable with the volume of file sharing via the Internet.
Advertising model
Now in Russia and abroad, a whole series of start-ups is opening up - video services working on advertising contributions. Of the latest Russian examples, ivi.ru and zoomby.ru are sites. It’s not very important for the viewer whether to watch a couple of commercials or not, but a legal site can provide exclusive materials, better image quality and the timely appearance of new materials. The only problem is that the leadership of the video portal for competitiveness with pirated resources needs to agree with a large number of copyright holders, because a small amount of video content will reduce all investments and promotion to nothing. Unfortunately, while modern Russian video services cannot boast a large assortment of films and series.
A similar system can be used not only in the field of video, but also in the musical field (Internet radio) or in the literary and journalistic field.
Convenient payment system, optimization of service, development of related industries
This idea is somewhat aloof from the rest, but it is also important in understanding the problems of copyright infringement. Why is piracy so popular? Is it really only about money? Most of the people polled by the author of this post said that if paying for digital content was as simple as simply inserting a bill into a computer, they would have bought most of the programs, music and films without hesitation. In order to buy, for example, a computer program, you need to either leave your home and go to the nearest electronics store, or deal with bank cards, money orders, serial codes, license agreements, and so on. In this sense, buying a pirated version is much more reasonable - it saves not only money, but also time with nerves.
Therefore, an important task for the copyright holder is to build an extremely simple connection between the consumer and the product, make the payment quick and easy, and service maintenance - prompt and enjoyable. It was not for nothing that the EU recently announced a five-year plan for the development of IT and telecommunications, where a special role was assigned to the development of legal music services and the formation of a single market for digital services and goods.
If the owner of the copyright still loses money, let him try to return it through related areas: for example, in the case of the music industry, through frequent concert tours with good organization and cheap tickets, which is so rare for Russian reality (and not only Russian).
Which of these methods do you think are the most effective? Which of them have the future? What are their advantages and disadvantages over each other?
What is better suited for cinema, what for music, and what for books?
Can you add some more items to this list?
I would be grateful for any interesting thoughts on the topic.