Life is just a bowl of All-Bran…

I’m becoming very interested in the whole business of the Internet and culture, especially when it comes to music. It is possibly, illegally, to download lots of music for “free” which can be played, copied and transferred really easily, unlike any DRM-ed music like iTunes. Curiously, you can get a better product for “free” than from a legit Internet retailer.

If “free” is prevalent, how can anyone make any money out of it? This article makes an interesting case. Don’t charge for the content per se, but for other things, like support and trustworthiness.

I particularly like this point: “It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators.” So make it easier to do!

I was particularly stirred by Wendy Cope’s article on poetry copyright infringement, so much so I wrote an email to the Grauniad which was never published. So here it is anyway.

Wendy Cope makes some excellent points about copyright and an author’s right to be paid for their work to be reproduced. Perhaps the world of literature needs to learn from the music industry. Despite the investment of millions of pounds to try and prevent it, music has been copied & redistributed illegally without the original artists seeing a penny.

Poems are already in a highly convenient format. They can be readily typed up or scanned and endlessly reproduced. There is no way Wendy can stop this happening. So why not go with the flow?

The ALCS website ( http://www.alcs.co.uk/) provides no obvious way of easily obtaining rights to reproduce at all, let alone a convenient method entirely usable on the web by the ordinary Joe.

Wendy thinks people should just buy the book, but people often hit on an individual poem and don’t want the whole collection. How about a series of fees for individual poems? Pay (say) £2 to put it on your website, along with a unique code and clickable button showing you have obtained permission? £3 to copy it and send it to your friends, with appropriate acknowledgements? Or if you like a physical artefact, how about postcards of individual poems, which you can buy from a shop or from an on-line store, download and print off?

After ten years, the music industry is finally beginning to see that making their product easily available and usable is the best solution to piracy. How long will it take the publishing industry to come to the same conclusion?

The whole of the creative world needs to get to grips with this issue. When even the music industry seems to be getting the lesson, perhaps there is some hope sanity, and a new business model, will prevail.