8 - Watermarks and Barbed Wire

Summary

Authors expect to be paid for their work. So do programmers, musicians, film directors, and lots of other people. If they cannot be paid for their work, we are likely to have fewer books, movies, songs, programs. This creates a problem if what is produced can be inexpensively reproduced. Once it is out there, anyone who has a copy can make a copy, driving the price of copies down to the cost of reproducing them. Copyright law is an attempt to solve that problem by giving the creator of a work the legal right to control the making of copies. How well it works depends on how easily that right can be enforced.

COPYRIGHT IN DIGITAL MEDIA

“The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Mark Twain – perhaps also copyright. Or perhaps not.

To enforce his legal rights, the owner of a copyright has to be able to discover illegal copying and take legal action against those responsible. How easy that is depends in large part on the technology of copying.

Consider the old-fashioned printing press, circa 1910. It was large and expensive; printing a book required first setting hundreds of pages of type by hand. That made it much less expensive to print 10,000 copies of a book on one press than 100 copies each on a hundred different presses. Since nobody wanted 10,000 copies of a book for himself, a producer had to find customers – lots of customers.