net.wars

The good news is that the UK government has undertaken a review of copyright law. "While it has been suggested that the present UK system strikes broadly the right balance between consumers and rights-holders, it also appears that there are a variety of practical issues with the existing framework," runs the introduction to the consultation document. You have until next Friday, April 21, to submit comments. Go.

But here's the bad news: do you notice anyone missing from that list of balancees? If you said, "Creators", you are a freelance and I claim my five pounds.

Freelances in journalism (in particular), and individual creators in just about every other field, are being increasingly and consistently forced to surrender their copyrights. Until 15 years ago (or thereabouts), magazines and newspapers in the UK bought First British Serial Rights; the freelances benefited from reuse of their work. It is now rare in both the US and the UK to find publishing outlets that don't demand all rights including moral rights (the right to be identified as the author of a particular work). It is equally rare to find a publisher that offers to pay more for the extra rights they are demanding. When they do, you are usually selling off all future interest in your work for a comparatively small sum (25 percent, in one case where I remember the details). Where there have been cases -- such as New York Times v. Tasini et al in the US -- establishing that, say, publishers must pay freelances for reuse of their work in electronic databases, publishers may make those payments once, but thereafter they alter their contracts to ensure they will never have to do so again.

The Creators' Rights Alliance spells all this out pretty clearly (although I disagree with their stance on the BBC). The same pattern is repeated throughout the creative industries. Photographers: high overheads, shrinking fees due to pressure exerted by the digital libraries. Filmmakers? The average director – as one said to me last year – is paid to do a film and sees nothing further once it's done; the same goes for most other participants in the making of a movie. The record industry? Read Courtney Love on that.

Copyright is not just a balance between consumers and rightsholders; two-legged stools don't stand up very well. Copyrights (and the other intellectual property rights) is a three-way balance between consumers, rightsholders, and creators/inventors. The latter group, without whom no new intellectual property will exist, is being squeezed by both the first two groups. Increasingly, the only people who will be able to afford to create anything will be people who are either rich to begin with or who have made enough money from some other activity – acting, modeling, founding a business – that they can afford it as a hobby. The idea behind paying professionals is not that no one else should enter the profession, but that it should be possible for someone to make a living; paying someone to write, think, paint, create full-time in theory makes it possible for them to create more and do a better job of it. Martina Navratilova may say airily that she wrote all her new book herself and that she just had "help" with the organizational side of it – but anyone who actually writes for a living knows that organization is the really hard part of writing a book. Anyone can throw words around.

So: what needs to be said to the Gowers review people?

First, get that third leg back under the stool before the whole edifice topples over. As Doris Lessing has written (of better writers than I am): "Without me the literary industry would not exist; the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the department of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages – all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put down, and underpaid person." No one is saying that anyone is owed a job. What we are arguing for is fair treatment.

Second of all, that the current situation with respect to intellectual property rights disadvantages everyone except the stars. Patents are too expensive to obtain – and still more, to litigate – for small businesses. Fair use should be expanded to incorporate the notion of private copying; there is no legal exemption allowing people to copy their CDs onto their iPods. That may have made sense when there was no technology for private copying, but these days it's just ludicrously out of step with what people actually want to do. We need limitations on what DRM is allowed to do (as net.wars has argued before).

Third of all, the notion of extending copyright terms on sound recordings and performers' rights from 50 to 95 years is ludicrous. Doing so will not inspire new work. It will benefit only the big record companies. There is no reversion of rights in the recording world when music releases go out of print.

Don't get me wrong: I really hope the Gowers review will come up with good recommendations for reform. But as written, the consultation is all about the business of copyright, and very little about the goals copyright is intended to further.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. She has an intermittent blog. Readers are welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There are three reasons to visit a physical-world store over an online one: convenience; a chance to sample in person a wide range of goods; good customer service. All right, there's a fourth: it's fun. At least, number four on that list is the reasoning behind such phenomena as Niketown or those airport hangar-sized Levi's stores that try to look like night clubs (at least, I guess that's what they're trying for).

Dixons, which this week threw in the towel as a British High Street retailer in favor of turning itself into an Internet-only retailer, has been scoring pretty low on all of those for some time now. Convenient locations – if you work in town – it had. However, notorious for being staffed by young, ill-trained (particularly with respect to computer equipment) kids detailed to sell extended warranties, it was never going to win awards for customer service. The stores were too small to carry a really wide range of merchandise. They couldn't compete on price with the big, out-of-town stores (including the chain's own PC World or its electrical retailer, Currys, which is to be renamed the so-1999 "currys.digital"). And visiting one of those stores was certainly never fun. I can't think of a direct US equivalent, in part because it's so long since most parts of the US have had comparable city centers. In Britain, where public transportation has kept city centers (mostly) alive by keeping foot traffic going past stores the "High Street" – the generic (and often specific) term for the main shopping drag in any given city, like Main Street in the US – has continued in its traditional role. Britain has some out-of-town malls and category killer stores, and it has many, many chains, but you can still find a local butcher or hardware store.

Pretty much all the headlines blamed the growth of ecommerce. Yet Dixons is being squeezed by all the factors above, not just the Web. And in fact, if they attempt to compete on the Web with their current high prices, it's hard to believe that its own brand name is going to be sufficient to make it a long-term success online. The same increasing competition that's squeezing the bricks-and-plastic Dixons – supermarkets like Tesco, which has expanded into electrical goods – are already firmly entrenched online. Sure, you can buy an MP3 player from Dixons. But without the real-world stores to advertise its existence like a painted van touring the streets, Dixons as an online brand name can't compete with Amazon, eBay, or Google's or Yahoo!'s shopping engines. And those are its main competition. Despite its ecommerce operation having grown by 50 percent year-on-year since 2002, does Dixons itself command the kind of loyalty that will get its less Net-savvy shoppers to follow it online? It seems hard to believe.

Among the non-Neterate of my acquaintance, I note that when they want to buy something confusing, like a computer, they do want to buy from a company they've heard of – but they typically want that company to be in the physical world, where they can go see what they're buying. The Web's habit of reducing such purchases to a list of features and specifications works well only if you are experienced and knowledgeable. Of course, we know there's nothing to see when you look at a computer that tells you anything valuable other than whether you like the keyboard, but the presence of a human to explain things and promise to fix them if anything goes wrong is infinitely reassuring. Even if that human is completely ignorant, barely out of school, and gives the wrong advice. I may react in horror when one of these folks goes to PC World instead of the much nearer and more helpful local computer shop, but they do it because they've heard of it and they think that fact offers some security in unfamiliar blocked drains.

It's mildly amusing to look back about eight years and remember that at the time everyone was predicting that the big offline retailers would come online and stomp all over the cyberupstarts. And then again to about five years ago, when everyone was saying that "clicks and mortar" was the way to success. Instead, what seems to be happening is that retail, like so many other things in life and business, is becoming increasingly polarized between the huge names and the niche players. You're the local café or you're Starbucks. You're Cybercandy or you're Tesco. Increasingly, the middle is squeezed out.

Meanwhile, branding is supposed to be the answer for everything. Sometimes – for example, Interfauna – it is the shop's brand that matters. But more often these days, especially in consumer electrical goods, it's the brand of the goods you are buying. No one buys anything from Wal-Mart because the name "Wal-Mart" conveys quality; the one quality that name conveys is "cheap". You choose Wal-Mart as the retailer because of the price, and you choose the brand of the merchandise for its design, functionality, quality, style, or perceived value. Retailer branding is comparatively fragile, even something as apparently unassailable as Amazon.com.

The most likely is that Dixons is a dying brand, and its Web operation will eventually be folded into a single operation that ecompasses currys.digital and PC World. And then Tesco or Wal-Mart will buy it.

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series. She has an intermittent blog. Readers are welcome to post there, at the official net.wars blogor to send email, but please turn off HTML.

Posted by Wendy M. Grossman at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)