Welcome to the Nightmare World of Open Piracy

(((You know, if we're all "pirates," every one of us, everywhere, what are we gonna call ourselves? You're supposed to have somebody to predate upon in order to be a "pirate," and if they're all dead, what are we supposed to do?)))

(((Maybe we can call ourselves "scavengers," since, if there's no commercial motive to produce new content, we'll be spending most of our time running search engines over the decaying installed base.)))

(((In other IP news, I'm selling off decades of incredibly with-it alternative-muso CDs from my Austin office. They're dying even faster than vinyl.)))

Link: Economist: Copyright is dead - Media Wonk - Blog on ContentAgenda.com - 1500000150.

"No wonder they call Economics the Dismal Science. At the Internet Video Policy Symposium in Washington yesterday (co-sponsored by Content Agenda), a chorus line of academic economists postulated that content owners face a far more difficult challenge than they know in monetizing their content on the Internet, and that the odds that we can build our way out of the current debate over how to manage scarce online capacity are virtually nil.

"The most enthusiastically glum was Gerry Faulhaber, a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the former chief economist for the FCC. According to Faulhaber, copyright is a dead letter. ((("Letters," you know. Ink on paper. Remember those? Authors used to get paid for that.)))

"Copyright is a very big issue in the legal world today, but in the business world, when you talk to consumers about protecting copyrights, it's a dead issue," he said. "It's gone. If you have a business model based on copyright, forget it."

According to Faulhaber, the "world of open piracy," created by digital technology will always thwart content owners seeking to leverage the monopoly granted to them by copyright law....