Excerpted from John Naughton in the Guardian, who is very happy with the Hargreaves report on copyright policy:
” The notion that laws framed in an era when copying was difficult, imperfect and expensive could work in an era when copying was effortless, perfect and cheap was a proposition that only imbeciles and industry lobbyists could entertain. But up to now, our politicians subscribed to it.
Hargreaves usefully explains why this ludicrous state of affairs has persisted for so long. “Lobbying,” he writes, “is a feature of all political systems and as a way of informing and organising debate it brings many benefits. In the case of IP policy and specifically copyright policy, however, there is no doubt that the persuasive powers of celebrities and important UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes. Further distortion arises from the fact (not unique to this sector) that there is a striking asymmetry of interest between rights holders, for whom IP issues are of paramount importance, and consumers for whom they have been of passing interest only until the emergence of the internet as a focus for competing technological, economic, business and cultural concerns.”
It’s a measure of the ludicrousness of our intellectual property regime that some of the most mundane, commonsensical recommendations in the Hargreaves report read like great leaps forward. Take, for example, for example, the idea that henceforth none of us – or at any rate, none of us who use an iPod – should be criminals. Eh? Well, under current arrangements, if you copy music from a legally purchased CD and transfer it to your iPod, then you are, technically, breaking the law.
Then there’s Hargreaves’s proposal that, in future, British lawmaking on intellectual property should be “evidence-based”. As opposed to what, asks the legal scholar James Boyle: “Astrology-based?” But our lawmaking in this area has been so weird that the idea that we might try rationality for a change seems genuinely radical.
Hargreaves is also very good on the thorny problem of “orphan” works – works still technically in copyright but for which no rights-holder can be traced. He wants the government to legislate to enable the licensing of these works – a commonsensical idea but one that in the insane world of IP lawyers sounds like revolutionary talk.
No doubt there will be lots of expert cavilling about this report. But overall it’s a refreshingly intelligent and welcome document.”