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The Web and CopyrightDateline: 4th May, 2003Put simply, copyright is the legal protection given to the creators of a piece of work against unlicensed use of that work. Copyright law prevents anyone other than the owner of the copyright in the work (or anyone to whom the owner gives a licence for a specific use) from benefiting from the work. It's a fair law. If someone makes, for example, a car and someone esle takes it and uses it without permission, that is theft. There is no difference between this and someone performing a play which I have written without my permission. that, too, is theft. There is no real difference in law between physical property and intellectual property. They come under different headings but the unauthorised use of intellectual property is exactly the same as the unauthorised use of physical property. There have always been those who have, for example, performed a play without getting the author's permission and without paying thre necessary fees. The odd thing is, such people would not dream of stealing the book which contains the play from a bookshop. They would see that as theft but would not, for some reason, regard making use of (and even making money from) the play without permission as theft. Now we have the Internet and file-sharing. The original file-sharing method, Napster, is now no more, but there are others, the most popular of which is Kazaa. Like Napster, it allows people to share music files. Someone gets hold of a song (perhaps by buying a CD, perhaps by recording it from the radio), converts (rips) it to a computer format such as MP3, and allows others to download a copy from his/her hard drive. Thus it is possible for hundreds of people to get hold of the intellectual property of someone else and that owner gets no financial benefit from it. A clear case of the theft of intellectual property. I have just read an article in a computer magazine which suggests that this is OK - that because it can be done, it should be done. We want free music, therefore we should have free music. The music industry is being demonised by the likes of these computer magazines because it objects. Now there is, I have no doubt, a lot wrong with the music industry, and the big corporations probably make more from CD sales than the artist does - just as publishers make more from the sale of books than the writers - but this is not a reason for depriving both of the fruits of their labour. A year or so ago I had to get a solicitor to send a "cease and desist" letter to the owner of a website who had stolen - and I use that word quite deliberately - some pages from this site, passing them off as his own. Had he not done so, I would have taken him to court to claim damages. There are pages from this site - both my own articles and reviews by our reviewing team - on other sites, but they are there because permission has been asked and granted. There is even one site with which we have an on-going agreement that we can use each other's work. You will also find here news stories which are carried by other theatre sites and by The Stage. Sometimes this is because we all get the same press releases; sometimes it is because we pick up stories from each other's sites, just as newspapers scour their rivals' pages for things they have missed - there is no copyright on facts! At times the BTG beats other sites to a story: at times one of them beats us. That's the news business. But none of us would dream of using another's features. This week we publish an interview that Philip Fisher had with the director of the revival of Abigail's Party, David Grindley. It was first published in The Stage. We are publishing it this week because we have just received permission from The Stage to do so. Intellectual property is our lifeblood: we publish what we create ourselves, what is in the public domain (legally!), and what we have permission to publish. It sometimes feels as though we are fighting a rearguard action. There seems to be an increasingly prevalent attitude which is summed up by "I want it so I should have it." Writers, musicians, actors, photographers, artists, all have the right to benefit from their work: no one else has that right without their permission. If anyone can perform a playwrights' works without permission and without, should (s)he require it, paying me a fee for doing so, what incentive is there for him/her to write? There is, of course, the joy of seeing your work performed, but without payment for that performance, then no playwright can make a living from his art, which means that he has to fit his writing around anothe rjob, which means he cannot devote his full attention to his writing, which means he cannot develop as a playwright to the extent he would otherwise, which means he doesn't write as well as he could, which means audiences have to suffer an inferior product. Apply that thinking to a musician, novelist, poet, photographer, even software developer, and you see why copyright is vital for a healthy arts community, and why, even though the Internet makes the theft of copyright works easy, it should be resisted. Articles Indices:
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