Now you © it, soon you won't

OpenBusiness.cc just spoke at PEN – the authors association – and now The Times has published some of our views on the future of publishing. Under the title Now you © it, soon you won’t we discussed the challenges to current publishing models and how copyright regimes ought to change. Jamie King writes “we need to examine new models for funding creative works — to address the question of how cultural producers will survive under the new paradigm. New approaches to copyright and reproduction are not just necessary, but inevitable. Copyright — the right of a creator to control the reproduction of a work and to sell this control to others — is a legal device that was designed for an earlier social/technological moment.

Copyright made good sense in the context of an innate cost barrier to reproduction (with the book or the record), and where an author could reasonably expect to earn a living by selling physical reproductions of a work. The law backed up the prevailing physical order. Today it stands directly against that order.”