ARCHIVED — Darwin O'Connor
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COPYRIGHT REFORM PROCESS
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Submission from Darwin O'Connor received on September 14, 2001 via e-mail
Subject: Comment on Copyright Reform
We are now entering the digital age. The changes that are going to occur and the benefits that will be gained will be at least as great as the industrial age. New industries will rise, old ones will fall. How exactly it will turn out, no-one can say. It is far too early to define the rules for this new age.Distributing content digitally dramatically increases the flexibility in what can be done with the content by the user. Before when a consumer bought a book it could only be read on page at a time and it was only indexed as thoroughly as the publisher choose. Audio Tapes where limited to playing songs in the order they where recorded. With digital content these limits are smashed. A Book or an entire libraries can be searched for any set of words easily. Anyone can instantly access any song in their collection, from their home, car or even out for a walk. This is only the beginning of the changes.
The relationship between the artist creating the content and the consumer enjoying it could be totally changed. In the past to reach a large number of people with your content required substantial resources. Money was required for publicity and manufacturing of the media the content would be distribute it on. These services where provided by the distributors, like the record labels, publishers and television networks. In the digital age artists can easily do these thing themselves. Using the Internet you can communicate with anyone around the world at very little cost, telling people who might want to know about your content about it and sending it to them. Digital technology is even making the production services provided by the distributors unnecessary allowing people to produce high quality audeo and vidio in their home.
However, I fear that many of the changes you will propose will be not designed to usher in the new age, but to graft the rules and limitations of the old age on to the new, and maybe add some new ones on top of that in order to provide maximum benefit to the distributors. Where once we could loan or sell the content we bought distributors are seeking the prevent this.
In your consolations you should be talking almost exclusively to artists and consumers, because the distributors will say what ever they can to help ensure things change as little as possible, because they know they could be soon out of the picture. The artists and consumers are the only two groups that matter. All the others are just optional extras.
Darwin O'Connor
(address removed)
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