Image by Joi via Flickr While we rage on with the debate for or against copyright, and as bloggers, and just about anyone from those who write free book reviews on Amazon to those people who add thousands of pages of content to Wikipedia and other systems, we do need to think about copyright and what that should entail. Cory Doctorow writes an eloquent article on the copyfight, and why we all need to join in on this one.

I know when I asked Cory for his advice on what I should do with my first book, and in talks with my publisher and my own feelings about copyright; we pushed it out on Bittorrent. His advice made a world of difference to me and was one of the reasons that I put the book go into Mininova’s Bittorrent network, and knowing that I will do this again with my next book.

It also looks at how I use the presentations that I give at work, and how we can adopt and change the classroom into a more Socratic method, the collaborative learning that happened in ancient Greece, we all learn better from each other building on an idea in tandem, or in conjunction with each other. This form of learning worked well through the middle ages, where instructors got students based on their popularity, that popularity based in part on how fair and sharing that instructor was to the students. Web 2.0 enables and disrupts the educational models put together post civil war where you had one instructor, teaching often at the end of stick or a GPA, as a reward or punishment for learning exactly what the teacher wanted you to learn, often out of controlled and school board vetted texts and other teaching materials.

We can use copyright to control not just each other’s works and how they are used, but also to control populations by limiting what is generally knowable. Emerald Insight, Proquest, Blackwell Synergy hide hundreds of thousands of papers behind pay walls, limiting access to information and materials that could generally benefit people if they had unfettered and unrestricted access to that information. We also use security classifications in much the same manner, and while some material needs to be classified, when it comes out of DARPA, NASA, or the GAO, does it really need to be classified? What have we gained by pay walls and classification? The argument that unfettered access to information, research, and pushing back copyright back to what it was before, a limited monopoly to recoup the money invested in the idea makes sense in the hyper connected world we live in. We all want knowledge, we all want to know things, when they are hidden or restricted they benefit no one.

While we all have opinions, what we all are doing about copyright also extends into what we are doing with blogs, video, music, movies, and just about any other form of media that we use. As Cory points out if you love Anime Music Videos, (AMV) then odds are likely you are dealing with works, video clips and music that are copyright someone else. While the AMV is an original work, the underlying material is someone else’s copyright. Depending on the viewpoint of the copyright holder, this is either ok or not ok, and if not ok then the copyright holder has to go hunt down these creative works and either embrace them or try to silence them.

We really are at a stage when the model of success, the concepts of innovation, fame, or notoriety have become so blurred by digital products that we truly have to try new models. The old models are creaking and collapsing under the weight of decades of what was a limited monopoly to turning into something completely different. Did I give up the copyright when I put my book up on Bittorrent, no, but I sure pumped sales of the book because people could see it free and decide if they wanted to own it. With over 2000 downloads last time I checked, and me beating the odds on a self-published book in sales (average 2 a day, where the average self-published book only sells 75 copies in its lifetime) averages, did Bittorrent help, yes undoubtedly. Much like the experiment with Radio Head, many took for free, but there are those that paid. Those who visited Mininova came from all over the planet to download and look at what the book was about, and decide if they would want to purchase it. Sometimes free is good, keeps you away from purchasing junk you do not want based on marketing hype. Free is a vetting model, would it really be worth the 19.99 for the DVD, or can I watch it and see if it is really worth purchasing?

In all, free is ok, but the model needs to change to accommodate free, and that means many changes, not just copyright, but in copy left and creative commons as well. It also means responsible usage on the part of people, if you keep it and play it you should go buy it especially if you love it. As with all systems though, including the Lawrence Lessig idea of free culture, we need to change things, and if we do that means we need to make some serious choices here. The question is, do we support the copyright model, or do we abandon that model, and where do average people fit into the process. Average people are making all these interesting, good, bad, and some quite ugly things out of our copyrighted works. The question is do we continue to hunt them down, or where else should we literally draw the line.

Tags: cory Doctorow, book, copyright, free culture, change, business model, copyfight, support, amv, Lawrence lessig