The Left's handouts

By Cato Strøm, CEO of TONO

IN DAGBLADET on April 17, commentator Andreas Wiese defends the Liberal Party's half-hearted attempt to be cool for the youth a few months before the election. Partly with distorted stories about the music industry, partly with an analogy to the common law, he tries to show why the work of artists and composers should flow freely among 4 million Norwegians. Why the rest of the world is excluded is unclear.

The analogy to common law is not apt. Common law is one of our oldest legal institutions, and can be traced back to the time before property rights. Intellectual property, on the other hand, has owners. That would mean that a common law right to intellectual property presupposes confiscation of the rights. And that is probably what the Liberal Party wants.

THE IDEA ABOUT free culture is not new. The ideas of the left are old-fashioned ideas that have been tried to be legitimized by referring to new technology. The philosophy about the free flow of art has been put forward by thinkers with greater principled weight behind their argument than Sponheim and Wiese, both of whom have new technology as the basis for their views.

Leo Tolstoy already believed that intellectual work was reward enough in itself. The knights of the spirit fight best on an empty stomach. The inner urge to create is good enough and the desire for honor and fame provides enough stimulus. So society need not worry about the costs of art.

Today, the Western world is in the wonderful situation that we can afford to pay for the art we consume. We don't have to hide behind the argument about technological legitimacy in certain industries. Most music is available for access with the artist's and songwriter's consent on legal services such as Phonofile and iTunes. We can afford to pay for what we use. We can even afford to buy 20-second ringtones for 15 kroner. We don't steal them, because it's not possible since there are systems for such things.

SHARING music through file sharing is not part of a public domain. File sharing is within the commercial cycle. File sharing is an intervention in the artists' economic cycle. If the artist's work becomes free public domain as soon as a copy is published, the economic cycle can be set to zero. And here we are probably at the core of the problem. It is impossible to compete with "free".

"Free" immediately puts legal online solutions for sale in checkmate.

The release of intellectual property would also be an encroachment on the personality principle of intellectual property rights, a principle that is parallel to getting paid for the work one does. The principle implies that the author should have both the honor and responsibility for the works he creates. It is about respect for human personality and independence. Therefore, artists must be given access to a certain amount of control over what he/she has created. Wiese and the Liberal Party will certainly resent this in their easy dealings with music's copyright holders. Perhaps they will see it more clearly in literary intellectual production. For file sharing is not a phenomenon that is only linked to music. The Liberal Party's voter courtship and Wiese's applause will, when increased bandwidth allows, also hit authors, book publishers, journalists, film workers, etc. just as hard as the music industry. The next bestseller at, for example, Gyldendal Publishing House does not have to be bought, if one follows the Liberal Party's thinking. It can be shared. And legalizing file sharing will naturally have the consequence that the initial uploading of the work to the internet without the author's consent will also be trivialized and eventually legalized.

THEN YOU ARE left, as in the very old days, with artists on the royal court's list for social security or alms. And lucky is the one who falls under the category worthy of compensation, cf. the Liberal Party's decision. We note that the Liberal Party uses the term compensation. Not wages for work, not payment for use or sale, but compensation. This should mean that one can apply to some state national fund to possibly be considered for a work grant or similar. And this is how it should be done worldwide, the Liberal Party believes. But first, international conventions such as the Berne Convention and international trade agreements must be buried.

The music industry has been in a state of flux for a long time, not least because we represent a social good that is extremely popular and sought after. Those who create these sought-after goods want to get it out to the public. We have long known that the Internet's possibilities for distributing music are countless. The development of legal, efficient and high-quality services could certainly have been faster. Likewise, a 70-year term of protection can certainly be discussed. We know that there may also be divided opinions about this among copyright holders, as the key is to protect the author during his lifetime. But that does not undermine the legitimacy of the author himself choosing whether, when and how a work should be used.

WHEN THE LEFT NOW argues that new technology forces copyrights to become the property of the people, it is just as easy to turn the argument around and claim that the new forms of distribution and new technology more than ever enable copyright holders of literary works, artists, composers, and filmmakers to communicate with an audience that will pay for what they use.

The Liberal Party's voter courtship may at first glance seem utopianly harmless and some may even find it a little sweet. In reality, it is very serious that a political party of any size is sending out signals to the people that the internet should be declared a "free speed" zone. That view can be taken further. What new technology makes possible must now also be made permissible in many other areas.

BUT THE INTERNET is nothing more than a new market with new opportunities for artists to "sell their goods". We already have national and international rules that regulate this market. What we are largely missing are responsible politicians, citizens and other actors who, from their standpoints, can help to make the regulations known, respected and enforced.

In government, the Liberal Party introduced a modern rights regime for the administration of copyright in 2005 by implementing the EU Copyright Directive. Now they suddenly think otherwise and undermine a regime that is based on recent legislation that came into being after consumer interests were given greater weight than in any other revision of the Copyright Act. This leads us to conclude that the Liberal Party's motive is a gigantic voter wooing where the bill is sent to artists in most genres worldwide.