Partnership, Property, and Disintermediation
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for February 2002
Partnerships are where you find them and what you make of them—and natural partnerships can turn into unnatural oppositions. That may be what’s happening with copyright and intellectual property. If so, it’s because intermediaries have grown more powerful than the partners.
Natural partners
Who are the partners? For books and scholarly articles, they are authors and readers. For music, they are musicians and listeners. These are natural partnerships: Each suffers if the other is absent. Most writers want to be read and are less concerned about squeezing every dime out of readers than about reaching their natural audiences and making a decent living in the process. The same goes for most musicians.
Copyright helps maintain a balance between the needs of the creators and the needs of the consumers. Copyright encourages creation, both by protecting creators’ rights and by encouraging the intermediaries we’ve needed in the past.
Intermediaries
Until recently, it was difficult to produce a professional-quality book or get it to readers without a publisher as intermediary. Good publishers still add value by editing, packaging, promoting, and distributing books. Until recently, only the richest musical performers could find ways to reach audiences (except in concerts) without using recording companies as intermediaries. Bookstores and record stores act as second-level intermediaries, providing marketplaces for readers and listeners and expanding the reach of creators.
Libraries act as intermediaries of a very different sort. For this discussion, think of libraries as surrogate readers.
Somehow, first-level intermediaries have become more powerful than the partners they exist to serve (since publishers can’t exist without both writers and readers). Publishers and record companies—and more particularly, their trade associations—have achieved economic and political power that no author or reader can equal. That power has yielded changes in copyright that unbalance the partnerships, undermining the interests of creator and consumer alike on behalf of the intermediaries. The extension of copyright terms should have served as an early warning.
More recently, intermediaries use technology—the threat of massive casual piracy—as a way to increase their power. This is how we got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that subsumes the First Amendment in the name of intellectual-property protection, undermines fair-use and first-purchase rights, and encourages intermediaries to treat consumers as thieves. As for creators—how many authors have spoken out in favor of DMCA?
It could get worse. Some inter-mediaries tried to use post–September 11 lawmaking to ensure that they could attack consumer systems without liability for damages. Others are pushing the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act , a bill that would require copy-protection technology in all digital products.
Selective disintermediation
Improved technology cuts both ways. Partners may be able to work together without intermediaries when the intermediaries grow burdensome.
Thousands of lesser-known musicians now peddle their own CDs directly over the Internet, offering free MP3 tracks to attract listeners and selling CDs at reasonable prices. With CD-Rs, an unknown can get started for a few hundred dollars—and for a few thousand dollars, short-run CDs benefit creator and listener alike. Better-known artists and their heirs (including the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, and Jimi Hendrix) use similar means to make their archives available.
We’ve always had self-publishing, but today’s technology can nearly eliminate the barriers to professional-quality publishing. When the big publishers aren’t interested (or when they aren’t editing or promoting "small" books in any case), contemporary techniques allow writers to reach readers in a manner that works well for both partners.
Am I suggesting that publishers and record companies are dinosaurs? Not at all. They still serve worthwhile functions—but they also claim more prominence and power than seems reasonable. Most authors don’t assume that readers are thieves; most musicians don’t assume that their fans want to rip them off. When intermediaries damage us all through unbalanced power, it’s time for the partners to assert themselves. Technology can help.
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