If we’re surveying the content producers of the world in an attempt to judge the validity of strong copyright protection, shouldn’t we also consider the opinion of all the content consumers? If we consider every act of copyright infringement as a vote against strong copyright protection, well, there’s really no contest. For every litigious rock star there are a million torrent-wielding listeners.

If the only reason we allow a state-granted monopoly is for the benefit the public, and the public widely rejects it, does that make copyright obsolete? Can society just opt-out?

If we’re surveying the content producers of the world in an attempt to judge the validity of strong copyright protection, shouldn’t we also consider the opinion of all the content consumers? If we consider every act of copyright infringement as a vote against strong copyright protection, well, there’s really no contest. For every litigious rock star there are a million torrent-wielding listeners.

If the only reason we allow a state-granted monopoly is for the benefit the public, and the public widely rejects it, does that make copyright obsolete? Can society just opt-out?

That is the failure of “alternatives business models” to emerge except as experiments or exceptions.

Most touted “alternative business models” are irrelevant — they attempt to figure out how to still directly pay creators for their copyable creations. In some cases looking for business models is wrongheaded — many will create for zero financial gain or even pay to create. In others the “business model” is not “alternative” at all, it just doesn’t involve paying for copies. Personal appearance payments have, are, and will constitute the primary earnings of many artists, including in some of the countries mentioned.

That is the failure of “alternatives business models” to emerge except as experiments or exceptions.

Most touted “alternative business models” are irrelevant — they attempt to figure out how to still directly pay creators for their copyable creations. In some cases looking for business models is wrongheaded — many will create for zero financial gain or even pay to create. In others the “business model” is not “alternative” at all, it just doesn’t involve paying for copies. Personal appearance payments have, are, and will constitute the primary earnings of many artists, including in some of the countries mentioned.

So I’ll just note one of the ways this argument is biased in favor of copyright. At any given time, the burdens of expanding the scope/length of copyright will disproportionately fall on later generations of artists, so long as–a reasonable assumption–the current generation’s own inputs tend to draw more from unprotected sources than their progeny will. This parallels the great deal that the first generation of social security recipients got; this first generation is precisely the group we should least listen to.

This whole line of thinking–”the market relies heavily on copyright, so libertarians who argue against it are trying to substitute their a priori reasoning for the distributed knowledge of the market!”–is simply misguided. Market efficiency is always only relative to the initial distribution of resources, which crucially includes legal privileges such as copyright. When given such privileges, of course people will use them, and of course they’ll ask for them if they think it will do any good.

But we don’t. Instead we see filmmakers from Korea and China and musicians in Ghana, Mexico, and Uganda asking for the meaningful enforcement of traditional copyright.

This seems like a non-sequitur to me. The fact that people are asking for a policy that benefits themselves doesn’t prove that policy is necessary. Certainly we don’t consider it an argument for farm subsidies that a lot of farmers are asking for them. The question isn’t whether filmmakers and musicians want copyright protection—everyone wants legal protection from competition—it’s whether those filmmakers and musicians would produce more or fewer movies and songs under a different legal regime.

I don’t really understand why we’d look to third-world cultures for examples. Information goods—especially frivolous entertainment—are relatively less important to an economy that’s still struggling to fulfill the basic needs of their people. Such an economy isn’t going to be able to support a significant number of musicians or filmmakers (at least compared to the support available in the United States) under any conceivable legal regime simply because movies and music are luxury goods, and poor countries can afford fewer of them.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to look at rich countries, which do exhibit at least some examples of creativity that doesn’t rely on copyright? The blogosphere, Wikipedia, the free software movement, and a lot of up-and-coming musicians appear to be waiving their rights under copyright and encouraging wide distribution of their creative works. If one wanted to make a case against copyright (which I don’t) isn’t that where one would look?