Businesses built on copyrighted products … never depended on stopping all infringements. On city sidewalks and in country flea markets across the nation, you will find truckloads of bootleg music tapes, videos, and software … Infringements galore! … How do these companies stay in business? It’s simple: copyright law succeeds at maintaining public markets for copyrighted products – markets where the owners can charge and receive a price for those products. It is irrelevant whether any given infringement goes unpunished – as long as it is kept outside the public marketplace … If a pirate operation drifts close enough to the surface … the Net cops will infiltrate and bust it before it can make a dent in the copyright owner’s profits.
Predictor: Rose, Lance
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, attorney and writer Lance Rose comments on copyright issues on the Internet. Rose writes. ”Copyright is dying, some say. It is too old to run on the Net; it can only grasp feebly at streams of electrons spraying through cyberspace. Copyrights are relics of the crude physical world, best suited to brute things like books, tapes, floppy disks, and CDs … This is a seductive view among those captivated by the idea that ‘information wants to be free.’ But it is wrong. Businesses built on copyrighted products – record companies, book publishers, film producers, and the like – never depended on stopping all infringements. On city sidewalks and in country flea markets across the nation, you will find truckloads of bootleg music tapes, videos, and software, as well as knockoff T-shirts and watches. Infringements galore! Visit some foreign countries, especially in Asia, and you will find whole economies based on ripping off US software. Surging trade in knockoffs and bootlegs is a fact of life for the music, film, publishing, computer, and other copyright-based industries … Yet many companies in hard-copy industries enjoy year after year of record profits … How do these companies stay in business? It’s simple: copyright law succeeds at maintaining public markets for copyrighted products – markets where the owners can charge and receive a price for those products. It is irrelevant whether any given infringement goes unpunished – as long as it is kept outside the public marketplace. This is easy. Cops have plenty of experience in sweeping the public markets clean enough for business. Now they are walking the beat regularly in the online public markets: online services, bulletin boards, and the Internet … legal scare tactics assure that online systems who are more interested in business than playing cops and robbers will discourage organized copyright infringement on their systems, especially infringements out in the open. OK, so the public thoroughfares can be kept honest, but won’t criminals and pirates continue to operate elsewhere? Sure, but only if they stay deep under-ground, where they won’t interfere with public markets where the copyright owners make their profits. If a pirate operation drifts close enough to the surface that it threatens legitimate markets, the Net cops will infiltrate and bust it before it can make a dent in the copyright owner’s profits.”
Biography:Lance Rose, a lawyer, earned a high profile for his expertise in Internet issues in the 1990s. He wrote “Netlaw: Your Rights in the Online World” (1995). (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Controversial Issues
Subtopic: Copyright/Intellectual Property/Plagiarism
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Emperor’s Clothes Still Fit Just Fine
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/rose.if_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney