Page 57 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

COPYRIGHT

. The benefit of copyright is that it allows the creator of a sought-
after information asset to reap a reward for its exploitation. If
software or any other creative or inventive information were to be
distributed without such reward opportunities, then many would
be discouraged from creating it in the first place.
. Protecting and restricting the flowof information also presents
significant problems. To some extent, information is a public
resource. If people cannot gain access to it then their own ability
to innovate and produce, or to discuss and debate, will be limited.
Business opportunities will be diminished and a ‘democratic
deficit’ will ensue. The ‘information commons’, where the
collective exchange of ideas takes place, can be potentially
confined by legalistic protections that deny access to information,
especially when copyright is aggressively pursued by big
corporations against private individuals or public educational
institutions.
The free software ‘open source’ movement, integral to the develop-
ment of the Internet, was founded on the principle that innovation
required collaboration and access to information. If legal or
technological measures had been put in place to ensure that code or
software could not be used without permission from the creator/
owner, then the development of the Internet would have been
substantially slower. It also may have developed an entirely different
character as a result.
Potential profits are often the central motive behind legalistic
controls on information. As Boyle (1996) and others have pointed out,
large companies have taken advantage of laws intended to assist
independent creators to gain a market advantage, with the implication
that their ‘ownership’ becomes so expansive that it restricts the ability
of others to create. In fact the information economy is subject to the
same monopolistic tendencies as the industrial one. At the same time,
however, the ‘copyright industries’ or the content industries that are
becoming so important to the world economy cannot exist without
copyright.

See also: Author/ship, Convergence, Digital/analogue distribution,
Intellectual property

42