Copyright, Patry and Akerlof's Law

It was with some sadness I read this morning of William Patry (we are distant admirers of his work) deciding to end his blogging (and even more so that he decided to turn off 4 years of informed opinion on copyright law). Clearly being Google's chief counsel has made life increasingly difficult, as has the increasingly clear trend towards copyright law being written by the richest incumbents. as he notes:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

I think a number of us non lawyers have been increasingly concerned about where copyright (and patenting) is going, so its a real reality jolt when a rational lawyer confirms our fears (as did Larry Lessig).

But what also struck me was this point:

On top of this there are the crazies, whom it is impossible to reason with, who do not have a life of their own and so insist on ruining the lives of others, and preferably as many as possible. I asked myself last week after having to deal with the craziest of the crazies yet, "why subject yourself to this?" I could come up with no reason why I should

Last week I wrote up some of the thinking from the Diginomics session at the Wealth of Networks Conference, and the view that digital content today is Akerlof's Law gone wild - ie low transaction costs and free content have led to adverse selection of quality - which Akerlof showed inevitably leads to crap stuff driving out good. This is how it happens in digital media - sane people get driven out by a**holes who can access media too easily and cheaply - leaving the digital sphere increasingly awash with cr*p.

(Another lesson here - I used to refer to some of the back catalogue, and now its gone. Digital content that I don't own can be whisked away.....)