Why is it easier today to violate copyright laws?

Answer 1

Technical innovation has constantly made infringement easier. Movable-type printing presses and readily-available paper predicated the first copyright law, as printers were able to mass-produce books cheaply. The invention of the player piano caused great outcry in the music publishing business, and the mechanical license was born. Photography made copying visual works easier. Once the photocopier arrived on the scene, no book was safe.

All of this seems terribly quaint when compared with digital reproduction and the internet. With reproduction such as photocopying, there is always a loss of fidelity: the mix tape made by holding the tape recorder up to the radio wasn't going to sound as good as one you bought in a store, and a copy of a copy of a copy would be significantly worse. Digital copies, on the other hand, are bit-for-bit identical to the originals: take a pdf from a website, email it, put it on a thumb drive, whatever, unless something major happens to the file, it's going to appear indistinguishable from the original. Combine the ease of digital copying with that cheap distribution method known as the internet, and you have the easiest, cheapest mechanism for copyright infringement ever known.

Another reason violating copyright is easy is that many times, people don't realize they're doing it. For every hard-core infringer systematically ripping DVDs and posting them, there are hundreds of high school students downloading the movies without a second thought.

With all of these ideas, let's look at an example: a painting.

Say I spent a month creating an oil painting of the view from my back porch. It's my intellectual property, and since there's only one, scarcity gives it implied value. If it's, say, 1824, and photography hasn't been invented yet, the only way anyone can infringe on my copyright is to come see the painting and paint, draw, or etch a reproduction of it. If it's 1975, they might take a photograph and reproduce and sell the photograph; I'm losing scarcity--and therefore value--by the decade. But if it's 2011, they can take a photograph, make it their Twitter background, email it to their entire address book, some of whom make it their avatars (it's a really good painting), one of whom uses it as the background in an animated movie he's been working on, and so on...any value that might have been ascribed to the original work is more or less dissolved: who would come see it when they can see it on their phones? Who would buy it when they can print it out at home or just throw it in a digital frame? As infringement becomes easier, the value of my intellectual property decreases.