What is Copyright?

A lot of people haven't asked me lately, "You know Weis, I'm confused by all this legislative hooha over online music. With all the lawsuits, speeches, and so forth, I'm not sure whose side I should be on. Can you explain this to me, without using any big words, doing any research, or citing any actual facts?" This article will attempt to answer that question.

You see, it all comes down to copyrights. A couple hundred years or so ago, Congress or the President or someone invented the idea of copyrights. Of course, they couldn't copyright the idea yet, so it became community property, and was instituted by the Government as law. The idea behind the law was that if inventers and artists got the exclusive right to sell whatever they produced, that would encourage people to create things. So, they figured, if you're the only one that gets to make money off of your creation, you're more likely to create something. This is what, back in olden times, they called "spurring innovation."

Now, fast-forward to the 1950's. Back then, some big companies called the Music Industry spurred innovation by buying some music from some musicians, so that the Music Industry could sell it for them. That's not exactly the same as copyright, since the Music Industry didn't actually sing the music, but that's okay because the musicians were poor, and as everyone knows, singing costs lots of money. So, the Music Industry invented the idea of putting about ten songs on a thin platter called a "record" and charging a bunch of money for it, and they got a copyright on that idea, and started doing it. Then later, some other guys got an idea of sending music through the air to a device called a "radio", which was pretty much like sending it to people on a record, except it didn't cost the people anything. So, the Music Industry said, "Hey, you can't send music to people! We already copyrighted that!" and the radio people had to do whatever the record folks told them to.

Then, the Music Industry figured out that, hey, people kind of liked getting music for free through the radio, so much that they would find out about new music from it. So the record people thought, "Hey, as long as we control these radio people, we can make people listen to whatever we want, and decide what music will get popular and what won't." So they started telling radio people, "If you do this, and don't do that, then we'll let you play the songs we have copyrights for" and the radio people didn't want to go along, but they had to, or else they would go broke. This is a good example of that "spurring innovation" thing I mentioned earlier.

After a while, the Government found out that the Music Industry was telling the radio people what to do, so they had a bunch of big trials, with lots of accusations and yelling and money and hoopla and Congressional Panels and whatnot, but eventually they just told the Music Industry to stop telling the radios what to do. Specifically, they said the radio people could play whatever they wanted, but they had to pay the Music Industry a flat price for each song - they called this a "mandatory license." Then, the Music Industry had to give some of the money to the people who made the music (unless the musician was black, in which case the Music Industry got to wait about forty years and give it to their kids). So the Music Industry had to go out and find other ways of controlling the radio people, which they still use today.

Nowadays, things have changed. The Music Industry has invented a completely new way of sending people music: they put about ten songs on a thin platter called a "CD" and they charge a bunch of money for it. Then, some people came along and got the idea of sending music through the internet to a device called a "computer", which was pretty much like sending it to people on a platter, except it didn't cost the people anything. So, the Music Industry said, "Hey, you can't send music to people! We already copyrighted that!" and the internet people had to do whatever the Music Industry told them to do.

However, the Music Industry had learned from the radio people, so this time they're being very careful, because they don't want the Government to come in with another mandatory license to spoil their fun. So first, they very cleverly drove all of the internet music companies out of business. Then, they spurred some more innovation by starting their own companies to do the same things as the ones they had just sued out of existence. This way, they can send music to people over the internet the way people want, but they don't have to worry about anyone else controlling anything, and they can tell people what to do again.

Unfortunately, there's a wrinkle in this plan that no one could possibly have foreseen - sometimes the Music Industry would tell people to do something, and they wouldn't do it. So, to correct this, the Music Industry need to ask the Technology Industry to help out. That way, if the people tell their computers to do something, and the Music Industry tells it to do something else, the computer will listen to the Music Industry. Which is fair, because the Music Industry copyrighted computers, too. To help out with this, the Music Industry copyrighted a senator named Fritz Hollings so that he would make a law that would change all of the regular computers into Music Industry computers. This sounds like it would be hard to do, but fortunately the Music Industry is friends with Disney, who copyrighted magic wands.

And, that's where we are today. So what does the future hold? Well, the Government's going to hold a bunch of big hearings, and everyone's going to argue a lot, but eventually, I think the Music Industry will figure out that all the people who listen to the music are the problem. So all they really need to do is send music to the people's computers, and charge the people for how much music they send, but make it so the people can't actually hear the music, because then the people would be violating the copyright, which (as we've seen) would not spur innovation. I think that, when they figure it out, the Music Industry will think this is a great idea - but it's too bad they can't use it, because I copyrighted it.