This article in Time talks at length about the technological and legal problems reaching the fore with regard to illegally duplicating and distributing television broadcasts. What it does not talk about is why.

Why would I want to spend all day finding a few episodes of Angel: The Series on Morpheus, download them, play them at low quality on a computer monitor, burn them to disk, and share them with friends? Well, that is just what I’ve done. While at home this week I have downloaded most of season 1 and a substantial chunk of season 2. Why? Because I want to watch the show. Because I want to see it from the beginning, and it is not being shown from the beginning. I download Angel for the same reason that I use my TiVo: for the convenience. I don’t want to watch The Daily Show at 11 pm, and I usually miss the repeat in the afternoon. The simple solution is for TiVo to grab it for me, and I can watch it at my leisure.

There is a whole massive industry devoted to giving us entertainment, but what if we don’t want it? I have written previously about my dream cable TV system, wherein I can choose the 10 channels I want and pay for only them. Well, now I say dump that, I want to just see the shows I want, I’ll pay for them, and drop the ads.

If UPN is giving the folks at Buffy $1.6 million per episode, why not just charge $1 each to the 1.6 million viewers? Right now they have, by some estimates, over 4 million, so it seems like a good idea. Of course it is very unlikely that anywhere near that number of people will pay to watch the episode, even if it is commercial free, at least not until micropayments, video-on-demand, and pay-per-play media becomes mainstream. I really don’t see the problem if it does.

I hate the recording industry. I hate the system as it stands, whereby bands have to get signed, get promoted, get radio play, sell a certain number of copies, at a certain price, and get a certain cut. The system itself is flawed. Bands should not need the power of a label behind them. They should be able to independently hire promoters. There should be no cost or risk to putting an album out – it should all be digital, we should be able to pay two cents per play or a buck-fifty a song and keep it forever.

I hate the recording industry, and so I don’t buy albums. And yet, I don’t like pirating and breaking the law. So I try to buy albums direct from the artists. Or I try to support them by paying them directly using MP3.com’s Back the Band feature. Or whatever.

I like to say I have bought a CD, but I don’t like paying full price. I have bought several used CDs in the last year, and now I am wondering why. After all, I am not helping the bands at all. I am really doing them no better than if I were to download their songs from the net.

The fact is, music is intellectual property, and should be treated as such. My opinion on this has really changed as I’ve taken some serious time to think about it, and what I’ve come up with is this: the medium is not the point, the point is the music. Well, duh. So the right of first sale, the ability to resell something you’ve bought, should not apply here, because what you are buying isn’t physical. You are buying a “license.” Now here is where it gets evil, not inherantly, but because licenses can get evil. Microsoft wants to charge us a yearly subscription fee for Windows – that is okay, it is their license. They do not have to grant us perpetual use of their software. I thuroughly believe that. However, once the copyrights and patents expire, their software MUST be open and accessible to all. Furthermore, those copyrights should be set for reasonable limits, which, in the computer field, should be no more than 10 years.

But I get off track. The system needs radical change, and the reason why is because when you produce a work, a non-tangible, information work, you should get paid for eveyr person who uses it. Buying a book used is not the right way to do it, because the author gets nothing. Every time someone wants to read the book, they should have to read it according to the license. They should pay for either a non-revocable lifetime license to read/keep the book, or a pay-per-read. Same with music. Same with movies. The property here is not the physical video tape, it is what is on it. And by giving people the right to first sale, you are hurting the incentive to create that is supposed to be inherant in the copyright system.

The point of the system is to encourage people to create while benefitting the public as a whole. Therefore, patents, copyright, etc. should be as short as possible while fulfilling these two obligations. I think it follows logically, then, that music should get 10 years of copyright, and in exchange, artists get to use whatever contract they want. Let the market decide – if people think the pay-per-play cost is too high, they won’t pay the song, and the cost will go down. If MS makes their Windows only available on a yearly subscription plan, and people don’t like it, they’ll stop buying, and MS will get the message. Does this make sense to no one but me? What am I missing here?

People need to be compensated fairly for their work, and at the same time, their work must be open in such a way that, when it becomes public domain, as it should relatively quickly, it is easily accessible to all. The tool is right here in front of us: the internet, micropayments, open standards. We just need to do it. And don’t count on Congress or the RIAA or the MPAA working towards anything workable any time soon….