Key questions

• 1. How is the rising significance of intangibles (such that increasingly nonrivalrous goods can be digitally copied/shared at no marginal cost by end-users) changing markets to piracy and property rights monopolies from sales to advertising vehicles?

• 2. Does copyright infringing sharing online kill incentive or is it a wellspring for creativity?

• 3. How has digital distribution transformed the music industry?

• 4. In an age of livestreaming (where copyright-infringing services compete with copyright respecting services), how can film and television industries survive and even thrive?

• 5. In the absence of a ‘live’ product for free sharing of recorded content to help sell, how is it that software and gaming industries have adapted best to free copyright-infringing alternatives?

Links to affordances

Not everyone has internet access, nor know all its affordances. Nevertheless, digital networks make access to copyright-infringing copies of intangible goods instantly available to billions, everywhere, all the time. Attempts to limit access by means of prosecution and blocking have failed due to successfully distributed evasion even when encrypted concealment fails. This is not due to technical inevitability but simply because commercial providers, in seeking to sell content, make it available to others who have an incentive to decrypt (breaking concealment) and to maximize evasion (via torrents, streaming and ‘cloud’ distribution). Free content creates a radical incentive (incitement) to infringe copyright. Creative industries that best adapt are those that have created services that users are willing to pay for, given that they can no longer be compelled to do so.

Synopsis

How has intellectual property (IP) become so significant in recent years, and to what do new threats to IP represent a challenge? Has the movement towards distributed network sharing thwarted regulation or merely adapted to it? The 1984 Sony ruling in the United States declared that a ‘record’ button on a video ‘recorder’ was not unlawful even when its primary utility was to enable copyright-infringing ‘recording’ of television programmes. The next 30 years saw this principle fought over again and again, and with diverse consequences. Does it make any sense to legislate against objects rather than their uses? The very notion of intellectual property is built upon the idea that creativity resides in objects rather than in action. However, online sharing undermines property rights, increasing rewards to creative actors when people stop paying for recordings and consequently pay more for live events.