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Copyright and the digital age: a contradictio in terminis
the work of other entrepreneurs? Why can’t they simply offer their artistic work on
the free market and try to attract buyers?
Let’s try to predict what would happen if copyright were abolished. One of the first
effects would be intriguing: all of a sudden, it would be no longer interesting for large
cultural industries to focus so heavily on best-selling books, blockbuster movies and
superstars. Why not? In the absence of copyright, these works can be freely enjoyed
and exchanged by anyone. Thus, the cultural industry giants lose their exclusive
rights to works of art. As a result, they will also lose their dominating market position
which keeps so many other artists out of sight. The market would become
normalized, which would enable many, many artists to show their work, make
themselves known, and make a fair income from what they produce. For most of them
that will be for the first time! This income initially results from being the first in the
market with a specific work. But there’s another factor contributing to the artists’
success. A more normalized cultural marketplace will offer more artists an
opportunity to build a reputation, like a brand name, which can subsequently be
exploited to sell more works at a higher price.
Before discussing some questions that may arise when we realize that with
digitization works can be multiplied very quickly, we should first focus our attention
on the monopolistic market position some cultural industries have. In general we
should be more active in breaking down dominating market positions by using
competition policies. Neoliberalism implanted in our head the wrong and harmful
idea that we may not put strict limits on the size of enterprises in our societies.
However, concerning the most sensible field of cultural expressions we may not
tolerate that there are only a few corporations, and their stockholders, that control our
common field of cultural communication. As previously said, democracy and the
human right of freedom for everybody to communicate and participate in the cultural
life of our communities is at present in danger. Four music conglomerates control
80% of the music that circulates in the world; there are just a few film and publishing
groups that have a massive interest – production, distribution and promotion – in
cultural markets; and most of them are even horizontally and vertically linked to each
other (Doyle, 2002; Towse, 2000, 2002).
So, what can be done? Abandoning copyright would remove one major support
from the dominance of our current cultural industries, but this does not necessarily
mean that their dominance would end. Established industries would still hold the
means of large-scale production, distribution and marketing of cultural goods and
services in a firm grip; this is one of the reasons for their current success: keeping total
control over artistic works from the source to the end consumer, and this distribution
model is what largely determines which films, books, theatre productions and image
materials we can enjoy. Therefore, the cultural market should be subjected to
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