It seems that Michael Arrington’s proposal that copyright law be re-thought - in the same way Roe v Wade means a pregnancy can be re-thought - will continue to run and run. First came an article on Silicon Alley Insider by Hank ‘not that Hank Williams’ Williams in which he claimed, quite rightly, that Arrington was flat out wrong.

Williams’ argument is that, if paid music disappears, so will books, movies, TV and the rest. He also argues that “there is no evidence *at all* that free music on the Internet is an effective (i.e. successful career building) marketing tool” and says that, in fact “if the recorded music industry goes down, concert sales will not grow — they will shrink. This is because the money that goes into creating concert demand (all from record label marketing) will disappear.”

His third point - about concert sales - is pretty off-base. Concert attendance is pretty marketing-inelastic - people will always attend concerts, whether they’re promoted or not. And if copyright theft reduces the profit from recorded music sales then there’s a big chance that bands will tour more, putting on more concerts to make up for lost revenue. But his other arguments are bang on - changing the copyright laws will affect all copyright, not just music. There is no real evidence to show that you can built a career online from scratch by giving your music away free - you still have to shift albums or tracks or t-shirts or other items protected by Intellectual Propert law if you want to survive as a full time musician.

And yet and yet and yet - TechDirt has a different view. More specifically, they take Williams’ views and disagree with them point-by-point in an article called ‘If you’re going to argue in favor of copyright, it might help to do some research first’.

In response to Williams’ point about books, films et al being affected by changing the IP laws, TechDirt tells us “[Williams] assumes that without copyright, content creation goes down. There’s no evidence to support this. In fact, we see more content creation today than ever before in history, and most of it is not because of copyright in the slightest.”

Do some research first? Okey dokey - I’ve done a bit. Three years at law school - including a year studying Intellectual Property - a former publisher who dealt with IP issues every day, and an author who has seen it all from the other side. Let me have a whack at this. Again…

Noone is assuming that content creation as a whole goes down without copyright protection. Humans are a creative species and cavemen didn’t need to add a little copyright symbol to their pictures of wooly mammoths. But what we can safely assume is that, without IP protection, high quality content production will go down.

As I said the other day, producing high quality intellectual property takes talented people, working full time, backed up by teams of production, sales, marketing and distribution professionals. It just does. The only exceptions are self-edited ebooks or video podcasts and, if you think that’s all we want our creative options to be, just imagine how you’d feel walking into a newsagents and finding all of the magazines have been replaced by Xeroxed fanzines. Or turning on an episode of Scrubs and seeing it acted out by Lego figures in someone’s basement. And with only one joke. The joke being that they’re all made out of Lego.

But there’s more. To rebut the idea that it’s impossible to make a career online alone, TechDirt points to ‘bands like the Arctic Monkeys’ (natch)… ‘who created the following that turned them into a huge success via the internet.’

Yes. And by huge success you mean millions of album sales, facilitated and protected by Intellectual Property law. Or perhaps you mean the huge sell-out stadium gigs - paid for and organised by - um - yeah, well, let’s stop this shall we? I feel like I’m arguing with a hippy but without the chance of being passed any decent drugs.

Seriously - can anybody send me a link to a single decent argument for reforming copyright law in favour of thieves? Just one. Or better still, does anyone who argrees with Arrington/Welsh want to write a guest post on the subject for this blog?

And not for nothing, neither - write something convincing, or at least well argued, and I’ll buy you the book and album of your choice from Amazon (up to a total of, let’s say, £50 / $100) and I’ll chuck in a copy of my own book too, a few weeks before it arrives in shops.

First convincing economic argument wins. Closing date - I dunno, whenever. I suspect it might take a while for someone to prove Arrington right on this particular subject. Those pigs aren’t going to teach themself to fly.

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