Re: copyright under stress

On Tue, Jun 13, 2000, Eric Eldred <eldred[_at_]eldritchpress.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2000, Robert Cumbow <rcumbow[_at_]grahamdunn.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 11 Jun 2000, Eric Eldred <eldred[_at_]eldritchpress.org> wrote, in part:
> > >
> > > [...]
> > > much of our popular culture is produced by big monopolies that more
> > > and more concentrate capital, perhaps for less and less return.
> >
> > Since Mr. Eldred is discussing the motion picture industry primarily,
> > and the live theatre and book publishing industries secondarily, the
> > term "monopolies" is way off base. Few businesses in the US economy
> > today are more fiercely competitive than those.
>
> "Monopoly" is used in two senses: (1) legal: copyright is
> an extension by statute of exclusive rights; (2) economic:
> concentration of economic units of power whether or not this
> power is being used in an anti-competitive manner.
>
> As far as these industries are concerned, I assert that each of
> them (Hollywood, Broadway, New York publishers and global media
> conglomerates) is as concentrated as ever in our economic history.
> (Well, I guess Hollywood was a little more concentrated at one
> point, but it is again approaching that.) Since they, like the
> music publishing industry, hold in their hands the effective
> distribution channels for almost all our popular culture (whether
> they produce it themselves or just buy it), I believe they
> constitute "monopolies" even if there is not one corporation
> that controls 90% of the market, as Microsoft does with operating
> systems and office application software suites.
>
> In the case of television broadcasting, for example, I have seen
> estimates that fewer than a dozen people control the content for
> 90% of what U.S. viewers see. For print publishers, there are
> now five or six giant conglomerates that control most segments of
> the market. Hollywood and music publishers likewise number only
> a handful in each market, and they tend to make it hard for
> competitors to arise. U.S. trade policy likewise attempts to
> extend this monopoly to all other nations. There might be fierce
> "competition" between Bertelsmann and Thomson, but even if they
> do not act as a cartel in economic terms they tend to exclude
> competition except from within their circle. The new competition
> seems to be coming from the Internet such as Amazon, and the
> conglomerates justify their concentration in terms of competing
> with this new force -- i.e., stifling it when possible, or taking
> it over when necessary. Here is where the monopolists are trying
> to employ their legal monopolies, I believe.
>
> I believe it was "commonsense" during the Reagan term to speak of
> U.S. Public Broadcasting as a government monopoly that needed to
> be broken up -- that if the networks did not supply "quality"
> programming then the cable systems would -- if viewers really
> wanted it -- therefore there was no need to "correct" the free
> market. This was and is an empirical prediction that can be proven
> false, I believe. Cable has not produced the quality and variety,
> and it is questionable if the Internet will effectively provide
> competition in the long run as well. Perhaps it would be better
> to recognize that our popular culture really is in the hands of
> monopolists and that we need to do something about that directly,
> perhaps by increasing author rights vs. publisher rights, or
> perhaps by limiting the extent of the legal monopoly, by reducing
> copyright term and increasing fair use rights and the public
> domain in general. (For example, consider the manner in which
> "intellectual property" rights of Microsoft are being treated
> after that company has been determined to be a monopoly and acting
> in restraint of trade -- that remedy might be more effective than
> the structural ones, because it strikes at the heart of what causes
> the monopoly in the first place.)

A minor point. If you are speaking economically, the term for more than one is oligopoly. A MONOpoly has only one (mono = one).

Harold Federow
<haroldf[_at_]bsquare.com> Received on Wed Jun 14 2000 - 15:47:10 GMT