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Information Ethics Problem of the Month is a feature on the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Web site. Librarians, computing professionals, faculty, and students will be invited to contribute short essays on questions of special interest to the university community. If you would like to comment on an essay, suggest a topic, or volunteer to write a guest column, please contact the feature editor, Jean Alexander, jeana@andrew.cmu.edu.

The Economics of Copyright Extension and Role of Libraries
by
Dan Mulvihill
Periodicals Associate, Hunt Library

There has been much attention given to the passage and Supreme Court upholding of the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act and other legislation that essentially favor publishers and threaten to reduce access to information. [1] Much of this legislative activity, and corresponding lobbying efforts of publishers, are a response to recent technological changes, especial Internet technology, which could radically affect the economic health of publishing, media and software industries.

Information is quickly becoming the life-blood of the modern economy. More people these days make a living in selling, analyzing, distributing, or manipulating information than in making tangible objects. Grace Hopper, one of the pioneers of computer science who made it possible for humans to communicate with machines with the invention of high-level programming languages, forecast thirty years ago that, for good or bad, information will be treated like a commodity and will occupy columns on balance sheets of every business. Like every industry, information has its buyers - individuals and organizations, including libraries - and sellers - publishers and other "information providers." [2]

One commonly held myth among those on the purchasing end of the information industry is that publishers and other information providers are a greedy lot wildly successful in their financial exploits, but you only have to examine the recent financial troubles of AOL Time-Warner, Primedia and even Disney to see that information providers are falling on hard times. The truth is that it is not easy to make money on information and profit margins for many publishers, recording studios, motion picture producers, and even most software producers are quite narrow. Disney's pursuit of copyright extension, along with their pursuit of tougher laws for DVD and software piracy, is not an act of greed but rather one of desperation and fear, some of it quite rational.

For the writers of the Constitution, the power given to Congress "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" was clearly important for securing authors "the exclusive Right to their respective Writing" because such legal security was important for the economic security of authors and publishers. The writers of the Constitution may have had idealistic goals but they were also practical enough to understand the needs of industry.

The 1790 Copyright Act was written at time when paper was not cheap and printing was an arduous task. Every major technological advancement since then has threatened the profitability of authors and publishers. It is no coincidence that every major revision to the copyright laws follows on the footsteps of a major innovation. The 1909 revision followed the development of the rotogravure of the 1890s and the 1976 revision followed the proliferation of photocopiers in the 1960s and 70s. It only seems inevitable that the Sony Bono Copyright Act would follow an innovation that could again threaten not only the publishing industry, but also other industries that essentially sell information.

Libraries are important components of the information industry complex and play a unique role in the distribution of information. Free and unrestricted access to information and opposition to extending copyright laws is such as entrenched part of the dogma of librarians, that one risks being ostracized from the profession for taking a contrary view, but may hope to be redeemed by pointing out the ironic fact that libraries were made possible precisely because information is and always has been restricted to some degree and copyright laws have often allowed authors and publishers to price information so high as to make much of it unavailable to individuals.

The original function of the library has been to serve as a sort of buyer's club for a specialized group of people - be it a community, an elementary school, a corporate body, or a university population - who pool their resources together to purchase material and information that they could not purchase individually. [3] Libraries mend a gap between publishers who wish to reap profits and individuals who would like access to information that they are unable or unwilling to pay for. Libraries, in fact, perpetuate the profit-driven practice of information vending by providing markets for publishers. There are numerous publications for which libraries are the only markets. If information were free and unrestricted, there would be little need for either libraries or a small army of professional librarians.