Introducing the Red Queen:
I
was told by my teachers to always start with a story, and what’s better than one
from my favourite childhood novel? Most of you might have read ‘Alice
through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll; it includes a scene where
Alice, in the strange land that’s designed like a giant chessboard, notices
that everyone keeps running but never reach their destination. Why? Because
when people ran there, everything else ran with them: the landscape, the
competitors, and even the destination. When she asks the Red Queen about this,
she gets this reply: “Now, here, you
see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you
want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
And needless to say, the mythical ‘twice as fast’ speed is practically
impossible because when you start running twice as fast, everything else does
the same – thereby nullifying the effect of your acceleration.
This particular scene is really popular among researchers and academicians across disciplines, s0 much so that it got a name – ‘Red Queen Race’. Why is the Red Queen race so popular a concept? Because of its practical relevance. A Red Queen race is the epitome of the existence of life, biological evolution, human society, market economies, game-theoretic situations, inter-firm competition, and so on. This article, too, is an attempt to explore a Red Queen race that goes on between Copyright protection and market efficiency – one where Copyright law and policy runs restless behind the mythical goal of market efficiency, only to find that the goal runs as fast. This article, however, focuses not on the runners but the one that got left behind – Equality.
Copyright Protection and Market Efficiency: the
part where equality was forgotten
Before we begin, it is important to understand
a concept that is fundamental to all policy discussions: the concept of ‘trade-offs’.
In human societies, we always come across trade-offs while making a decision. Let’s
say, for example, you want a pack of peanuts that’s priced at 200 rupees per
Kilogram. Here, you face a trade-off between 200 rupees and one KG peanuts; to
have one, you have to let go of the other – you cannot have both. Societies and
governments often face such trade-offs while making laws and policies. One such
familiar trade-off is that of the guns and butter, guns signifying
the budget spent on defence and butter signifying the budget spent on
domestic needs. One of the biggest and most confusing trade-offs that
policymakers face is that of efficiency and equality. Steps that ensure
economic efficiency often ignore social equality, and vice versa, and the real
challenge for a policy is to strike a balance between these two.
Now, equipped with the understanding of trade-offs,
let’s turn our discussion back to copyright protection. Although the initial
instances of Copyright protection were the result of political lobbying, the
latter half of the 20th century saw the emergence of economic
justifications for copyright protection. Albeit many, they can be classified
under two broad approaches: one being the access-incentive model, and other
being the property-right model. The access-incentive model visualises the
notion of copyright protection as being a trade-off between incentivising
creativity and protecting the creative commons from monopoly, with copyright
policy negotiating a bargain between these two. The property right model, on
the other hand, argues that creative works are public goods and hence
vulnerable to freeriding – the only way to prevent that is by internalising the
positive externality, by assigning property rights to creative works.
Examining the economic justifications for
copyright protection, one consistently glaring trend comes to notice: the excessive
focus on efficiency with total neglect to equality. Copyright protection has
been excessively focused on making the creative market efficient, ensuring
timely delivery of work, incentivising the creators enough etc, but when it
comes to distributional equality of the created works, it is largely silent
with the noted exception of a few fair use provisions. And the result has been
particularly disastrous for the marginalised classes of the society. A book
hunger was persistent, but copyright protection has brought with it a ‘book
famine’ for the underprivileged. While copyright undoubtedly has enhanced the
possibility of choosing for the minority of the English-speaking and
financially well-off population, it also has made the book-hungry realise that
the buffet isn’t for them. The much-quoted slogan “Half the world suffers
from hunger. The other half wants to lose weight…” has come to be
strikingly true for the book market as well. And as with world hunger, the
solution doesn’t lie in producing more, but in distributing better!
A story of the Copyright-induced inequality
The stories of inequalities created by
copyright are many and spread across the spectrum, but it helps to bring them
under a few umbrellas. Prof. Lea Shaver from Indiana University does the job of
classifying them under two broad categories: inequality across classes, and
inequality across cultures.
Inequality across classes owe it to the cost
barriers created by copyright protection. Copyright protection raises the price
of a book well beyond the marginal cost of producing one. Although there’s
indeed a certain fixed-cost to creative works which makes the average total
cost of the works greater than the marginal cost, the prices are often well
beyond any perceivable cost curve. In a 2014 research conducted by Xing Li,
Megan MacGarvie, and Petra Moser, the historical data from the United Kingdom
alone proves that copyright protection causes the price of books to be
skyrocketed by 150%. In a society that is already suffering from high degrees
of economic inequality, such high prices of books lead to a socio-political
inequality that superimposes itself with the existing economic inequality. Access
is denied to already marginalised classes, and inequality deepens.
Inequality across cultures owe it to the
language barriers created by copyright protection. Market-centred copyright
policies mean that the production of a creative work will directly depend on
its market demand. Works that cater to the linguistic/cultural minority are
thence underserved by this model of copyright incentivisation. A mere look at
the existing number of books and periodicals in English versus those in various
indigenous languages should give the reader an idea about the point being
referred to. Works are not only underproduced but also under-translated to
minority languages. Languages with little socio-political presence are often
ignored by publishers when granting translation licenses.
The language and cost barriers created by
copyright protection make way for inter-cultural and inter-class inequalities,
deepen the existing divides and sometimes create new ones. In the words of
Prof. Lea Shaver, copyright policies focus so much on formal equality that they
lose out on the substantial equality front.
A ray of hope
In 1996, the US lawmakers decided to loosen the
copyright law a little bit to allow non-profits to make and distribute books
for print-disabled persons without a license. The slightest change in law
brought about a significant change: non-profits came forward to fill in the gap
created by copyright law and soon print-disabled persons could access many
books without much hassle. This brings us hope. With this experience, we are
now positive that we do not need to significantly change the copyright
legislation to effect a significant change. A little change here and there
should do.
One possible approach is, of course, making
amendments to copyright law. Loosening licensing provisions, lobbying for
substantial equality, providing for easy and affordable translation licenses,
government intervention for addressing underproduction in certain key areas
etc. are some of the possible measures.
The much more powerful approach, however, lies
beyond the black letters of the law. They come from business and economics. The
business-approach would be to come up with models of incentivisation other than
copyright. Contemporary socio-economic researchers agree that copyright is not
and should not be the only incentive model for creative works; alternative
models can very well be built upon to replace or remedy copyright. The economic
approach would be in recognising the market power of the big book publishers
and letting the Competition authorities keep an eye on them.
A
combination of the legal, business, and economic approach may yield a more
egalitarian model for copyright protection, and that indeed is our only ray of
hope.
