Privacy, DRM And Sticking To Outdated Business Models

Cory Doctorow, writer, jour­nal­ist and suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man in the world of free con­tent,  does it again:

The topic I leave my fam­ily and my desk to talk to peo­ple all over the world about is the risks to free­dom aris­ing from the fail­ure of copy­right giants to adapt to a world where it’s impos­si­ble to pre­vent copy­ing. Because it is impos­si­ble. Despite 15 long years of the copy­right wars, despite dra­con­ian laws and sav­age penal­ties, despite secret treaties and wide­spread cen­sor­ship, despite mil­lions spent on ill-advised copy-prevention tools, more copy­ing takes place today than ever before.

The piece is mag­nif­i­cent. Two more quotes just to encour­age you to read it:

What should other artists do? Well, I’m not really both­ered. The sad truth is that almost every­thing almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. This has noth­ing to do with the inter­net, of course. Consider the remark­able state­ment from Alanis Morissette’s attor­ney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto win­ners, the tiny frac­tion of 1% who made it to a record deal. Almost every artist who sets out to earn a liv­ing from art won’t get there (for me, it took 19 years before I could afford to quit my day job), whether or not they give away their work, sign to a label, or stick it through every let­ter­box in Zone 1.

And this:

Viacom is just one of the many enter­tain­ment giants suing com­pa­nies like Google for allow­ing every­day peo­ple to upload con­tent to the inter­net with­out review­ing its copy­right sta­tus in advance. Never mind that there’s 29 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, that there aren’t enough lawyers in all the world to under­take such a review, and that throt­tling the videos (by charg­ing upload­ers for legal review, for exam­ple) would put prac­ti­cally every per­son who finds in YouTube the oppor­tu­nity for per­sonal and cre­ative expres­sion out of business.

Never mind that if this prin­ci­ple were passed into law, it would shut­ter every mes­sage board, Twitter, social net­work­ing ser­vice, blog, and mail­ing list in a sec­ond. That’s bad enough, but in addi­tion to these claims, Viacom has asked the court to order Google to make all user-uploaded con­tent pub­lic so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copy­right – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as pri­vate and vis­i­ble only to me and her grandparents.