On the consequences of digital locks
In 1998, we passed this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the DMCA, and what it says is that it is against the law to remove a lock even if you own the copyright to the work the copyright is protecting. So one of the publishers right now has said they've always insisted on digital locks on their e-books, and they're in a pricing dispute with Amazon who wants to take more of the money that they are generating through their books.
Under normal circumstances, if Amazon decided not to sell Hachette's books, you would expect Hachette to say to all the people who want to read J.K Rowling or Amanda Palmer's new book, "Here's a tool that lets you convert your e-books to run on iBooks or on Google Play or on Kobo or on Nook. Go ahead and just switch to someone else's store, and buy your books there." But because only Amazon is allowed to unlock Hachette's books, even though Hachette controls the copyright, Amazon controls the lock. Amazon now runs that negotiation. They have all the negotiating leverage, and what happens is the rightful share of the investor is expropriated by the platform.
On digital copyright law reform
We can easily see how you would make a digital locks rule that didn't do this crazy thing. What you would say is that "it's against the law to break a digital lock if you're violating copyright, and if you're not violating copyright, it's not against the law to break a digital lock." And that would solve the problem pretty handily because then we could make tools that let people do things that are illegal, but that the manufacturer doesn't want them to do, which is a time-honored tradition whether that's plugging things into your cigarette lighter in the car that the manufacturer never intended for you to do or using your blender to mix paint. You know what we do with our stuff is our own business, and if we break the law then maybe we get punished, but just using a product in an unintended way shouldn't be a felony.
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On new models of monetizing online content
Once we give up on the idea of applying copyright to normal people and we limit it to the industry, we know how to regulate the industry because we know where they all live. Historically, the way we have managed contexts in which it no longer became possible to control individual uses was to just let people pay once to use everything and then use statistical analysis to figure out who the money went to. So if you're at a radio station, you drop the needle, you don't call the record label to find out how much it's gonna cost you to play a song. You just pay a single fee, and then you figure out statistically at the end of the quarter whose music was played, and the money is dispersed that way. And the important thing is [that] as imperfect as this solution is, it's way more perfect than adding censorship and surveillance to the Internet in the name of making sure that people listen to music the right way.
Read an excerpt of Information Doesn't Want to Be Free
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
copyright
Internet piracy