orchestra21

In the wake of news that Capitol Records is suing Vimeo over music employed in the latter’s uploaded video content, Tumblr lead developer Marco Arment offers a copyright ‘thought experiment.’

Marco.org: What if copyright infringement were made completely impossible? What if we had perfect enforcement at the technical level? (I know this isn’t possible, but bear with me. It’s a “thought experiment.”)

Music and video sites would instantly and perfectly detect any copyright infringement in uploaded files and refuse to host them. People would be forced to create (or find) content that’s licensed permissively enough, such as under the Creative Commons, to allow their usage. We’d give the big music and video publishers exactly what they think they want. But it would actually demolish them. It would be the best thing that ever happened to those who speak so strongly against “all rights reserved”-style copyright enforcement.

Today’s demand for permissively licensed content is nearly zero because most people can get away with small-scale infringement. If that were no longer possible, all of these infringements would be replaced by much more demand for permissively licensed content. Any publishers unwilling to satisfy the demand would be left in the dust by those who would.

As a professional performer I tend to agree with Marco, and sense that a vast majority of artists would be on board with a licensing system that facilitated the sharing and creative reuse of their content [especially if that system helped to eliminate the profit-oriented content management mania that infects major media corporations]. Regrettably, the intersection of commercial interest and art rarely yields such a neat solution; we can probably only hope that the persistent openness of the internets forces broad acceptance of a model like the one Marco envisions.