Awesome. How much did the fire cost to produce?

Unless you can tell me how to make a $100 million fire and make a hefty profit, this doesn’t work in the real world!

The government.

The only way we will ever debate this topic clearly is by seeing it through the lens of investing in a creator’s ability to create instead of the creations themselves.

A builder can get along fine by providing a service, and he does not necessarily need to have any physical property to provide this service. A land owner may have all the equipment and bricks he needs to make a house, but it is all ultimately useless if he does not know how to build a house. That is why he hires a builder to do it for him. This is what it means to trade off goods and services with one another.

The builder’s skills may be classified as his “property” by an advocate of John Locke just as much as other tangible goods, and quite rightly. The way you steal this property is to enforce tyrannical laws that either forbid him from building in order to make a living or say that the property he uses belongs to the state and therefore cannot be messed with.

I hope it becomes clear that copyright law is therefore in direct conflict with John Locke’s concept of property. Because what it does is deny the true prospering of artistic expression as an ability by forcing all monetisation to stay away from this ability and instead exist within a NON-tangible good.

And as a result, the true value of a creator’s skills is distorted, he is forced to claim the entire world as being within his “fence” (universe in EMI’s Beatles-Voyager case?) which is a delusional utopia that encourages a great deal of Luddism, it means the creator surrenders his freedom when he puts his trust in his audience not to break this copyright law – quite similar to placing trust in a government not to abuse a free-speech restriction, and to top it all off it denies the fruits of labour that John Locke quite rightly defended in relation to derivative artists – not just at their expense but at the expense of their audiences as well.

The main justification of copyright is usually that the “free-rider” problem that stems from someone being able to take something from the creator without giving anything in return must be resisted. It is usually followed up by a gentle reminder that this free-rider problem does not stop at the casual Bit Torrenter, but extends towards those who will make tons of money from selling pirated goods. This is a serious question but it can be answered.

First point out of two, it must be noted that if there is a “free-rider” problem that exists without copyright, that free-rider problem must also exist with the pirates just as much as it does with those selling official copies (this “official” distinction can still be made without the need for copyright with hardly any rights oppressed at all). Pirates would not be able to make anywhere near as much money as they could in a world with copyright, because since anybody is free to make copies of what they want there is not much incentive for them to make money from pirated goods. But the seller of official copies would always have the upper hand since by definition you cannot pirate and claim the new good is official. Everybody will end up being drawn towards selling these official copies in order to stay in business.

This is why the fashion industry works so well – everyone buys the brands and the knock-offs are put in their place: outside in tiny street markets where it is seen as foolish to throw away money on imitations of products instead of going to the high-street stores to get the real thing instead. The so-called piracy here is domesticated in a way that copyright law could never dream of: all it can do is push the piracy underground, causing Al-Capone-like, untaxed illegal monopolies resulting from LEGAL (intellectual) monopolies, which ironically eliminates the pirates’ own personal free-rider problem since the pirated goods obtain a tainted value.

In fact, the only thing stopping most economists from saying why the fashion industry model of business can be adapted to the copyrighted creative industries as an alternative is that there is not enough incentives even from the branding. This leads me to my second point: assurance contracts. This is what fills in the gap. Tickets, pre-orders and others are proven ways of funding creators in a way that nobody can be cheated, and its pinnacle is being demonstrated in the crowdfunding revolution. Though this revolution is still young, it will be something to be feared once it matures. Because what you will have is an answer to the economists’ challenge of missing incentives for this fashion-industry based model.

As communication proliferates, through mail services, phone calls, morse code, radio, cassette, TV, satellite and now the internet, it is no coincidence that the power of assurance contracts has increased since more people can put money into the “hat” at once. It is much easier to book tickets and preorders than before. This is why I call crowdfunding the “pinnacle” of assurance contracts because it is born out of the internet’s beginnings. Crowdfunding would have been possible in, say, the 1940s and 1950s with the radios and phones, just not as obvious. (But before my critics take this as ammunition and say that crowdfunding would therefore only work in an interconnected, globalised world, they should bear in mind that pirating and plagiarism would have been unenforceable in these times as well since it would be hard to communicate and spot where it was happening.)

And the best thing about it is that the pledges are not limited to the consumers, but also the middlemen. Watch as YouTube via Google will start making high pledges worth tens of thousands of dollars or more in order to get revenue from the content being hosted on YouTube – multiply this with other middlemen who want rights to the official broadcasting: cable companies, maybe even ISPs to an extent, and you have your own “crowd” of corporations pledging and being part of the bigger crowd of consumers all making pledges to the creator.

And all the balance of power swings the creator’s way.

Why? Because his skills are ultimately important, not his products. He can dictate what price he is worth through how popular he is. And if he doesn’t get enough, nobody gets anything. That is how the deal should always be as a matter of principle: controlled and clear.

And… oh yeah. Derivative artists have their rights protected (we can use signatures and trademarks to distinguish originals from derivatives), fair-use/free expression issues simply do not become issues anymore, monopolistic powers are cut everywhere all the way from the MPAA to Kim Dotcom and the Chinese trade cheaters, DRM will be seen as what it is – a euphemism for malware, everyone’s fruits of labour become free from repression in true Lockean style, no international issues about something being copyrighted in one country but not another (in fact the money should go up for the creator when he uses crowdfunding on an international scale since exporting becomes less of an issue), cultures become more free-flowing while at the same time monetised justly, international cultures will benefit – for example the numerous anime fans of the West would be more than ready to give the Japanese studios crowdfunded money and make them rich on a scale never seen before, file-sharing will not be repressed to the darker corners of the internet and instead embraced which will allow powerful out-sourcing of data that will greatly decentralise information away from powerful enemies and be a direct challenge to cloud computing, the open source software movement will grow in leaps and bounds as more of the programmers get their funding from crowdfunds.

I could go on.

Copyright does not yield that kind of power for a second. It is a status-quo conservative position that is, as I have said, prone to Luddite tendencies. Sure, you might get many creators naturally walking away with money as a result of copyright’s monopolistic tendencies, but it is not a lesser evil I am afraid, not when it pushes people to oppose the development of communication technology as a whole. Never mind the crushing of derivative artists’ potential fruits of labour that massively outnumber copyright-protected successes (so you could even say that copyright is ANTI “intellectual” property, NOT for it), the attacks on free speech, the danger of DRM opening doors ranging from criminal hackers to a PRISM-tending government, the attacks on facilities that are greatly used by revolutionary forces in the Middle East and Asia, the deliberate overruling of public-domains of other countries, the extradition of domestically-lawful websites like Richard O Dwyer’s TV links website (the ISPs of the US were more to blame for allowing access to that site on US soil for fuck sake).

I hope I have made my point clear.

People who still dig their heads in the sand about this really invite historical disapproval. They will be compared with the Luddites who said that technology would somehow repress workers rights when it is copyright law that has done the most of this repressing.

If anything, once you show me content, or feed me an idea, you have robbed me of additional brain capacity that I could have used for something else.

So who is the thief now?