Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Copyright
Nobody is making money with free content on the web, except search.
People are used to reading everything on the net for free and that's going
to have to change.
(Rupert Murdoch, 'The Cable Show 09')
The whole web is going to have to confront a huge problem, namely, that
many of its users assume that everything they find on it should be free.
This is, of course, already an issue for the music industry, where illegal
peer-to-peer file sharing has decimated music sales; ever-increasing
bandwidth and the emergence of 'bit torrent' is having a similar impact
of the film industry, at least as far as the sales of DVDs go.
Indeed, online piracy is becoming an issue of concern for scholarly
publishers too. In addition to scholarly books and journal articles
appearing on general peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, a number of
websites dedicated to piracy of scholarly content have emerged.
Typically, these websites flagrantly violate international copyright law,
and even if the websites act on notices to take infringing material down
(as per the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, DMCA), the
overhead for copyright owners in serving notices to remove material,
and more so in detecting the infringement in the first place, is
considerable. If piracy of scholarly material continues to grow it may
threaten the sustainability of current business models or force a move to
a model that makes content freely available on the open web, thus
eliminating the demand for pirated content. At least for some areas of
scholarly journal publishing there is an alternative, in the form of pay-
to-publish models. Scholarly books, like the music and film industry,
appear to have no such alternative on the horizon.
Intellectual property and the web
Far too often, copyright is incorrectly and unfairly painted as a barrier
to creativity, which stops users from doing what they want with
content. In fact, copyright law strikes a balance between making
material available for the good of the general public (via well defined
copyright exceptions) and providing a mechanism for remunerating
rights holders. Copyright is therefore an enabler, allowing creators and
rights holders to get fair reward for their intellectual property, and
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