Intellectual Property will soon be History
It is not too risky to affirm that intellectual property will
soon be History.
Rules designed for the paper era are not useful, enforceable and
cost-economic in the Web era.
Here are a few reasons:
1) Intellectual property is not designed for the Web times
I strongly believe that intellectual property will soon be
history, not because Anarchism will succeed over Capitalism, but
because the Net Economy will find new ways to control ownership
of words and patents.
Words alone are mostly worthless. Nobody is able to make money
out of them anymore. Let's take someone whose words are unique
and valuable: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance. He collects
some royalties from his writings, except for:
- the 50% cut that makes his publisher - the 40% lost to piracy
- the 5% cut from the book physical maker - 3% from government
taxes -1% from his agent, lawyer and accountant
So, the Paper Economy offers him 1% of the potential profit from
his words.
On the other hand, what happens when you write for the Web?
Most word-content websites have lost money permanently since the
2000 Net Bubble. Even for prime authors, like Rawlings and her
Harry Potter, plagiarism has eaten half of the earnings.
Making money out of words in the web takes a little more than
writing. You need to point the words to those that might buy
something related to them. You also need to secure some form of
collecting money and measuring your response rates. The
webmaster and the site promoter replace here the publisher.
2) Writing for the Web is different than writing for paper
There are:
- few authors that know how to write for the Web (short,
focused, adjustable to the reader preference, keyword-dense,
sticky, connected with a merchandise or service)
- few publishers that know how to make money in the Web starting
from printed words from the paper era
- few webmasters who can transform electronic words in
non-electronic dollars, either dealing with authors or
conventional publishers
The Web Word Market is more dynamic, focused and automated than
the Paper Word Market. In the past, the unit was the book,
because you needed to print it, distribute it and sell it. Now,
the unit is the web page, a much smaller one. Or maybe the RSS
feed, the article, the forum posting or other smaller dynamic
forms.
3) Authors are not so valuable in the Web Economy
Names and brands are less important in the web, because nobody
spends too much time in one place, and the average user looks
for specific answers rather than just a pleasant reading time.
Can you name a single Web author that always calls your
attention? Are there any Web equivalents to Garcia Marquez or
Norman Mailer? There are blog authors that have followers, but
their names are not relevant. And the blogs with its traffic can
easily be sold to someone else.
By the way, names and pen names are out. A famous person in my
own field (SEO, or search engine optimizing) is GoogleGuy. A
good, sticky name with 2 relevant keywords in it. I don't care
if his real name is John Smith or Anand Brahmaputra. My own name
is Sergio Samoilovich, but I would like to change it to
Synonymizer, for e-marketing purposes. When I was trying to sell
my netic.com domain I signed Neticman. I own many domains
related to different products I sell. I might also own as many
virtual names.
And how about pen names similar to Indian names:
Man-who-blogs-for-a-living, Webcam-Girl, Pervasive-Word-Marketer
or the like...
Targeting the right audience and positioning your website in the
Search Engines under the proper keywords is more important than
winning a Nobel Prize or a famed contest. Success is now
measured in ad revenue rather than books sold.
My point is that in the Web, being the author of something is
not that important. What is important, is to own targeted
traffic that can buy a product by that author or any other. You
can always find an author offering his product thru an Affiliate
program, which equals sharing profits with you, the e-marketer.
Experts can turn a bad author into good web stuff.
4) Plagiarism is not well defined
So far, there is not linguistic or mathematic rule for
plagiarism. It is up to the lawyers to define fair use or unfair
use. This makes litigation very difficult. Some guidelines are
mentioned usually in University sites, advising students not to
use other's words without permission, but they rarely express a
numeric limit between quoting and plagiarizing.
Besides, some plagiarism rules are non-enforceable.
For instance, there is a problem when you plagiarize a short
text without noticing it. To prevent that, there should be a
central database or clearinghouse in the Web that you could run
your text against, in order to validate it. If I used a phrase
like 'New York Times' I will probably will run into the
newspaper attorneys, even if I was thinking about the weather in
the big apple.
5) Plagiarism is not easily detectable.
It is also a complication the fact that the web is a dynamic
medium, and there are no hard proofs of most infringements.
Plagiarism is non-detectable when the author makes slight
modifications in the copied text. There is no computer in the
world able to read the whole Web and find all the similar
phrases or web pages. The main plagiarism detection systems work
by sampling the suspected originals and copies, and those small
samples can be wrong: either false positives or false negatives
are possible.
Software like Synonymizer makes it easy for webmaster to create
almost-duplicate text, barely detectable for the search engines.
Finding plagiarists and punishing is very difficult. The web is
mostly distributed and anonymous.
Thus, a significant business is surging from the
plagiarism-detection needs of authors, universities and
publishers.
The anti-plagiarism-detection tool market is also surging.
6) Google is the leader in electronic detection and punishment
of plagiarism
So far, Google has some filters that reject duplication from its
index, and attempt to give credit to the original author.
For me, it is obvious that some software should take care of the
plagiarism issues, instead of the expensive and unpredictable
lawyers and judges. With previsions for Synonymizing.
Some kind of web service (the Web Economy) will rate the
originality of your words, the value for the customers, the
degree of infringement of the laws, and will provide you a
reward : traffic that you can monetize. Or a punishment:
exclusion from the main listings.
At this point, the Web Economy is doing that: rewarding
originality and witness, punishing duplication and dumbness.
Garcia Marquez could profit from AdSense and other ad servers,
and there would be little intermediation.
Maybe a small 'Plagiarism Algorithm' in Google and Yahoo can and
will replace Intellectual Property Lawyers... It will be
cheaper, faster and radically more effective.