The backdrop to headline-grabbing stories on megamergers, telecom reform, corporate earnings (and scandals) and shareholder suits is a far-reaching debate about the ways and means digital content is handled from the moment of creation.
It’s important because content-judging from evolving trends-is likely to be such a powerful driver of future wireless business. One only has to look at what increasingly occupies this paper’s news pages-deals, alliances and new products involving video, music, pictures, games, ringtones, news, etc.
Voice will always be an important part of the equation for wireless carriers, though some predict it may be given away one day as content gains ground-and profitability.
Congress, the Creators (authors, musicians, Hollywood, etc), the Digerati and others have dabbled in copyrights and wrongs in recent years. It is a complex, confounding matter demanding that hardened copyrights be reconciled with an already omnipresent Internet whose reach has now been extended by mobile phones and other wireless devices.
The copyright debate is playing out on various levels. One is access and distribution. The U.S. Supreme Court in late March is set to hear oral argument in a case about whether file-sharing companies are liable for copyright violation.
Last week, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah)-political opposites who happen to see eye-to-eye on the role of government in the content debate-filed a friend-of-the court brief in MGM v. Grokster.
Leahy and Hatch last year cosponsored legislation focused on those who intentionally entice others to commit copyright infringement. It is only one bill. There will be others.
Actors and musicians have declared war on Internet firms that give copyrighted material away free-after getting their cut. But this battle is about more than judging whether copyright laws are being broken. While some Internet downloading of copyrighted music and movies may be illegal, it may well become a (the) mainstream distribution channel that makes today’s angry creators richer and more popular.
A more fundamental question is what is owed to the creator and what is due the public.
Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who heads the school’s Center for Internet and Policy, is the ring leader of a mushrooming movement to reinvent the copyright regime. Lessig is especially critical of Congress for habitually extending copyrights.
“Monopolies are evil, even if they are a necessary evil. We rightfully grant the monopoly called copyright to inspire new creative work,” Lessig wrote recently. “But once that work has been created, there is no public justification for extending its term. The public has already paid. Term extension is just double billing. Any wealth it creates for copyright holders is swamped by the wealth the public loses in lower costs and wider access.”
