engleski

Cybercitizen's Need for Copyright

Copyright stems form the wish of an individual and/or institution to protect its own information from change, abuse or misuse by others, as well as to gain and restrict financial benefit(s) from its own previous work. However, the world is changing. Copyright idea comes from the world in which publishing is technologically and organizationally difficult, financially and time-wise expensive, indirect, as well as controlled, filtered, censored. Only small number of authors can publish and even then their reach to the audience is limited by geography, audience’s interest and accessibility and affordability of information. Cyberworld, on the other hand, allows just anyone to disseminate any information to anyone and everyone without intermediaries. It is fast, cheap, direct and without control. Publisher is often not needed and financial profit is not always the motivation to publish. In Cyberworld, even if one wants and holds copyright, it is very difficult to enforce it. Once the information is released into the Net, it is copied and stored in multitude of places for technical reasons: proxies, caches, back up and archives. Illegal copies appear and disappear suddenly in various places. Translation in other languages makes it very difficult to discover illegal copies automatically. Even if the illegal copy is found, it is very difficult to identify the violator and prove his guilt. Actually, protection of documents is a general need, much broader than the area of copyrighted materials. Today, solution is sought in technology by the use of digital signatures. Tomorrow, major solution will be organizational, in the form of various public, trusted “archives”, be it libraries, archives, solicitors or commercial back-up services. They will receive documents over the Net and store them on the read-only media thus preserving the content, date and authorship. In addition, author could store the acceptable use policy for the document, effectively applying customized copyright to the document. Every piece of text (possibly other types of information: picture, sound, etc…) could be looked up in public archive should any suspicion arise of the document’s authenticity. As for the wish of authors to gain financial benefits, very interesting is the emergence of the “open source” philosophy. Although originating from software writers community, it is gaining popularity in many other creative areas, as well. The idea behind it is that in order to ”sell” an information “product” it needs to be “packaged”: fully equipped, checked, formatted and advertised. Once on the “market” it needs to be maintained. For many authors this is not what they want to do or at least not in the most areas they produce information. In all those non-mainstream (for the author) areas they produce bits and pieces that might be very useful to other people and it would cause no cost or harm to the author if he would share it globally, free of charge. Other people might do the same and author might find them useful in his mainstream work. Thus, mutual sharing of information is useful and beneficial. Besides, it feels good doing something for others and them liking it. Simultaneously, another, extremely important technology is being developed: digital cash. The payments become safe, easy, fast and cheap due to low risk, anonymity and valet agents residing on customer’s personal computer. The most important feature is that it allows very small amounts to be paid directly to recipient, even the amounts like 10 cents. The technology of micro payments it’s the foundation of “one dollar economy”. In conclusion, everyone is (potential) author of a great variety of works. Publishing is cheap with minimum (if any) intermediaries between the author and the audience. Copyright demand and usage will not grow proportionally with the growth of authors and works published. The needs to protect authenticity, integrity and usage of documents can be satisfied through alternative “technologies” like public, trusted “archives”. The change of behavior of consumers can also be expected with the advent of micro payments, which will remove all obstacles to “pay-per-usage” for all consenting users. Thus, it is expected for copyright to decrease in its importance in Cyberworld and to be restricted only to certain publishers, authors and works at their discretion. More important, it is not expected that problems in enforcing copyright in the Cyberworld would have significant influence on the (speed of) development and publishing of any kind.

Publishing; Copyright; Information technology; Publishing; Cyberworld; Micro payments; Open source

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