Googling any question regarding intellectual property provides a revealing litmus of where we stand these days on matters of copyright. Want to find out if you actually have to “remove offensive material” from a file-sharing site or “cease and desist” from making that game mod? Good luck finding the answers online.

What you’ll find instead is a collection of Web services seeking to profit from copyrighting or otherwise servicing your original work. So rather than answering questions of what you can do, one finds info on what you can’t do. This is meant not to inspire obedience to the current copyright culture, but rather instill enough concern to have one’s own work “properly protected” from “theft”, but only if you pay for such a service.

It’s no wonder IP law is up and coming; it’s all about convincing people that they need to add bureaucratic buffers to their works, when – in reality – the vast majority of works will never be stolen, and even if they are, it’s not because someone stole your cool idea to make Harry friggin’ Potter.

A recent presentation at a writer’s conference had an IP lawyer present on the nature of copyright. It was useful information, but the only part anyone heard was how much it costs. It’s $35 to copyright each work, and one writer noted: “But I might only get $25 for writing it, so why would I pay more to copyright it than what I’m getting paid for it?” A valid question for which the lawyer had no answer, just more insipid PowerPoint slides (all bearing a moronic copyright notice).

Whether any writer should knock out an article for $25 is not the question. What writers should ask themselves is: “What are the odds that this story – for which I worked to get $25 – is going to go on to be stolen, used elsewhere, and make more money than I was paid for it?” The answer, of course, is “near zero percent.”

The lawyer – much like the Google results for any IP question – kept reiterating that it’s your ability to sue for lawyer fees that makes copyrighting a work a sound idea. So this was, indirectly, a means of self-preservation for this IP lawyer, seeding in the malleable minds of the copyright poor, that they needed lawyers to protect their creative works. I don’t think that’s accurate. What you need as a writer is luck, persistence, and a taste for Ramon noodles.

This trend of convincing even the meanest of artists to spend their sparse income on copyrighting is little more than a perpetuation of the bureaucratic cycle that has chilled creativity from the top down since copyright law’s inception. Nothing more.

In a bit of a blast from the past, Patent Arcade just posted some history about the Bleem! emulator and their David v Goliath case against Sony back in 2001.

It seems that Bleem! allowed users to user Playstation games on either the Sega Dreamcast or the PC. It had the same physical and digital copy protective measures as the Playstation. That is, it required the disks, and wouldn’t play backups or run without the proper disk in the drive. Certainly there were workarounds that could be exploited, but the same was true for the Playstation itself.

In case it’s news to you, console companies take a loss on each console sold. They hope to recoup that with game sales – where the real money is. This is why Dreamcast bit the dust: once everyone figured out how to bypass the simple copy-protection, no one bought the games, even though the consoles sold fine.

So, with that in mind, it might seen completely rational for Sony to do nothing at all to stop Bleem!. I mean, here’s a company ensuring that even those without the Playstation would still have cause to buy Playstation games. This would be like a burger joint selling nothing but their high profit margin items, like that 30 cent piece of cheese that costs them a penny.

Instead, Sony did what any copyright rich company would do: they litigated to the point of lunacy, losing in every possible way they could lose. However, the court costs were too much for little Bleem! and the company went bankrupt. I can hear notoriously Luddite Sony CEO Howard Stringer yelling: “That will teach you do try and sell our games!”

A story covered in Slashdot refers to the eventual judgment (naturally) for the plaintiff – Wizards of the Coast – against defendant and popular ebook site Scribd. The charge was allowing a user to upload a copyrighted Dungeons & Dragons ebook, which was downloaded 2,600 times before Scribd pulled it from the site.

Wizards was awarded $125,000, which – par for course – was exorbitant considering that Scribd made no money from the ebook.

What’s worth noting here is that companies making ebooks should use the built-in abilities to market ebooks better than regular books to advertisers. Then, the economic backlash of the book being shared is largely or completely mitigated.

For example, there are various educational reports on all manner of subjects – from using Google AdSense to writing a killer blog. They make their money off affiliate marketing embedded in the links in the PDF, not off the sale of the report. Sure, these reports bear a price tag, but they are rife on p2p sites, and have long thrived without backlash.

Why? Because the bulk of their moneymaking model is about getting eyes on the product, not on the money generated from sales.

So couldn’t PDFs of WotC content operate in the same way? Instead, they waste time and effort trying to track down and sue companies such as Scribd for a consequence they didn’t intend.That’s not to say that Scribd shouldn’t be responsible for whatever is on their servers and site; it’s just a pretty poor model when the only way you’re going to address the inevitability of piracy is to file lawsuit after lawsuit. Instead, how about coming out with more innovative ways of selling your products?

After all, it’s very arguable that whoever would download an ebook of D&D is likely not going to and never would have bought the paper product. So how do you make money off of such potential customers? Perhaps in-book adverts aren’t the only answer, but I can tell you what certainly isn’t the answer: suing everyone and making yourself look like jerks.

Last week began a case that could spell trouble not only for media owners, but for the resell market as well. It’s between Timothy Vernor and the software company Autodesk (who sells mostly drafting software). It seems Autodesk petitioned eBay to remove not only Vernor’s auctions of Autodesk products but to boot him off eBay for good.

Since eBay is akin to a chihuahua who rolls over at the first sign of dominance, they obliged. The only problem? Vernor wasn’t selling pirated copies of Autodesk: he was selling legally-owned, used copies.

This has long been protected by copyright law by what’s called the “first-sale doctrine”. However, Autodesk is trying to get around this by saying they merely lease the software, not sell a copy of it. Tomato, tomAto…

This debate is nothing new: the rights we have to resell products is the very reason that DRM and tricky EULAs about “leasing” software exist. But this is a slippery slope. The moment you control how someone can resell software – even something as expensive as Autodesk – what’s to stop the RIAA from using the case as precedent for outlawing the sale of secondhand CDs? How about DVDs or even VHS tapes?

This is the bread and butter of companies such as EB Games, but the industries have always loathed resell and have looked to ban it for years. It’s not because resale is illegal: it’s simply to make more money – nothing more. However, if I am not allowed to buy a secondhand copy of any media, and can’t afford the newest version, I’d be more prone to pirate, wouldn’t I?

Hopefully, the judge will see this as more industry hair-splitting rhetoric and semantic balderdash. It’s still a legal copy, and the guy has a right to sell it. Let Autodesk do what other companies such as Blizzard are doing, and limit the number of times it can be installed, suffer the inevitable consumer backlash, and then reverse their tactics like any other company trying to defy the after-market. Letting law interfere with something that is perfectly regulated by consumer spending would be a grave mistake. It would hurt consumers and many companies making a living off resale, and only make a handful of companies more wealthy than they already are.

Point of fact, I highly doubt there are media manufacturers out there closing their doors due to the resale market, but if such outfits are allowed to bypass the first-sale doctrine, you can expect to see plenty of other companies doing just that – hanging the going-out-of-business sign.

What effect will the Pirate Party’s agenda have on movements to make existing copyright better? Creative Commons and General Public License work on top of current copyright structure, and some worry that abolishing facets of the copyright structure could weaken copyleft ideas along with it.

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