Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

Summary 1. The Web has ignited the issue of copyright like never before in the history of publishing. It has become a minefield both for content creators and Web site publishers - the latter are running a higher risk.

2. Most U.S. court decisions are favoring existing copyright holders. Web publishers are being held liable for their actions, even in cases where third-parties are posting content to their sites.

3. A range of new legislation is changing the copyright rules, most prominently, in the United States.

4. A wide range of solutions have been, and continue to be proposed, to address these conflicts. One solution of particular interest is Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons approach - it's flexible and is gaining significant adoption (including on this site).

5. The topic of "rights and permissions" is at the heart of the practice of controlling and accessing copyright. Digital systems that address rights and permissions are essential for large content producers and consumers.

6. DRM - Digital Rights Management - is in part a practice, but more so a variety of technologies that can be embedded in content to restrict through software how content is used and reused. Hackers love the challenge of defeating each new DRM scheme as it appears; few DRM schemes remain unbroken. There is a slowly-increasing belief that DRM will not succeed in protecting content and therefore the copyright challenge requires new and different business models.

Overview of the Future of Copyright

One issue, which at first glance appeared to have settled into a restful sleep, has come back directly into the cross-fire of all publishers. The issue is copyright. It is having a much greater direct impact on Web publishers than on print publishers, although print publishers are very much caught in the cross-fire. Indeed it is causing increasingly sleep-deprived nights for nearly all content creators, most significantly, from the music, film and television industries.

In the early days of the Web it was a devil-may-care free-for-all, riding under John Perry Barlow's cry that "information wants to be free" (although, according to Wikipedia, "information wants to be free' was originally pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Barlow's 1994 essay, "The Economy of Ideas" (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html ) broke new ground in the debate. In 1996 Barlow wrote "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html ) another key document in the copyright battle of minds.

This seemed like a possible dream until the larger content companies realized that there was income available from content on the Web, significant income, and that there were copyright issues to dispute about who really owned the rights to publish this content on the Web (was it the publisher or the author/creator - early contracts never envisaged the problem). But most significantly, publishers of all kinds realized that they had to control how their content was distributed on the Web, and the most direct way to assert control was via copyright laws. The courts have been kept very busy!

The history of copyright is a fascinating one, well worth anyone's study. There's no shortage of information on the Web related to the subject. Start with the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law ) and move on from there.

It's really fairly straightforward: authors (not publishers) were offered a modicum of economic protection in relation to their creative effort, as a simple incentive for creative folks to create.

But the distribution of content soon fell into the hands of publishers (as later would filmmaking, music production etc.). It soon became clear that the real costs associated with a creative endeavor were (1) the physical production of the work and (2) its distribution. Slowly but surely copyright began to be the right of the producer/distributor rather than the author. The author merely licensed his or her work to a producer, and generally received a fairly paltry royalty in return.

The end game on this proposition was producers (such as Walt Disney or Harlequin Books) simply hiring talented people, paying them a fee, and retaining all rights and revenue.

After extensive lobbying pressure from large copyright beneficiaries like The Walt Disney Corporation, copyright is now in place for the original lifetime of the creator/author, plus 70 years.

The only folks who think this is a good idea is the holders of lucrative copyright franchises, and the politicians who were successfully lobbied on their claims. There is no basis in fact, in law or in practice to support this muzzling of creative voices.

Similar to today's herniated patent legislation, copyright law now inhibits creativity, particularly on the Web, rather than encouraging it, at this crucial moment in the Web's development.

This is a major concern for all publishers, and particular those who, perhaps more casually, post pre-published material to the Web.

With these many concerns, I decided to make this Website accessible via the Creative Commons copyright: "Creative Commons is a new system, built within current copyright law, that allows you to share your creations with others and use music, movies, images, and text online that's been marked with a Creative Commons license."

The license which I'm granting this entire site under a Creative Commons license is as follows:


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don't have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

For more information, see http://creativecommons.org/

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