Why we're still stuck with paying for content

You probably have a rough idea of what copyright is, but you'll be surprised to learn why it was invented.

Copyright was first established 300 years ago, in Great Britain.  After the the printing press spread through Europe, book authors were struggling with the publishing companies. Since there were no notion of 'intellectual property', the only profit an author would ever get from a book was the sale of the initial manuscript; from that point on, the publisher could copy the text at will, keeping the whole profit. 

Copyright was created to prevent the big publishing companies from exploiting content creators.

Through copyright law, authors gained the sole rights to share, copy and adapt their own creative works – that’s what the famous "all rights reserved" means. By doing an agreement with the publishing companies, they would then be able to keep a profit from every sold copy, for a total of 14 years. 

After that date expired, the work would enter the so called Public Domain - allowing everyone to use it whatever they see fit, thus essentially turning it into public property.

Over the years, there have been several revisions of copyright law, allowing it to include media like images and sound and extending the duration of the protected rights. 

The current maximum possible duration, in the U.S., is 120 years. That's right, 120 years. Think about it for a while. What are the consequences of this? After that amount of time, the original author is long dead - so, who's to profit from the selling of the works? The author's family? No, not really. 

There's a reason the copyright duration has been expanded over and over.

The big publishing companies are exploiting content creators using the very same law that was once created to assure fairness of  revenue sharing

You have probably heard of the RIAA. They sued thousands and thousands of internet users over peer-to-peer music file sharing in the last decades. What exactly does this mean?

Unlike what usually happens in the book publishing business, the major music recording companies actually hold the copyright to the content. That's right; if a band signs a contract with a music label, they are (most usually) transferring the full copy rights to them. Don't actually take my word for it, go get your dusty music CDs and check the copyright notices!

This means the record labels retains all rights over the created music, so the only promise of fair revenue to the artists is the contract itself, which usually has a lot of fine print. In practice, artists get peanuts, if anything at all.

The musicians have been waiving their rights because, historically, there's little chance of achieving success without a labels facilitating production and distribution. However, this is slowly changing and the artists are becoming more and more aware of it. 

Nowadays, with a cheap laptop and an internet connection, anyone can record an album, and distribute it through the whole world; or write a book; or make a drawing. There's actually software that let's you do all that, for free. Suddenly, the real value of the business provided by the content publishers is exposed: zero, nil, zip. And there's an old adage to making a profit: cutting intermediaries.

But it goes farther than that. 

The big question is: do you really want to make a profit?

It's January 1984. Richard Stallman, a programmer at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, quits his job. He believes software should be free. Not only free as in 'no cost', but free as in 'freedom' - the freedom to distribute, copy and modify it; the very same freedoms that are protected by copyright law.

Copyleft is born.

Copyleft describes using copyright law to remove restrictions on distribution, instead of imposing them. It allows distributing copies and modified versions of a work and possibly requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. In other words, copyleft is copyright turned against itself.

The actual rights 'granted by copyleft' can be as many or as few as the author decides them to be.

In 2002, a non-profit called "Creative Commons" released a set of documents which would become the the most important artistic copyleft licenses. An artist may decide which one he wants to use according to the rights he decides to grant society at large: the right to unrestricted distribution or limited to non-commercial uses, and the right to adapt the work, adapt it only under a similar license to the one used, or not at all

There's, today, millions of people using Creative Commons licenses. There's free music, free photographs, free books, free paintings, free operating systems, free encyclopedias. The quantity of content created is utterly amazing. These people do this, not in hope of profiting from it, but because they realized something important:

The sheer passion of creating and sharing

I know this, because I'm one of them; I'm here, now, sharing this text with you. You may do whenever you like with it; you may distribute, adapt, and copy it; you may throw it in the bin, or give it to your friend.

We're the whole world.

And we want you.

Will you join us?