Protecting Copyright Often Seems To Fly In The Face Of Good Business

from the bingo dept

Wed, Oct 7th 2009 1:51am — Mike Masnick

Dave Title recently had a post on his My Media Musings blog, where he talks about a student "lip dub" music video, which he notes almost certainly violates copyright law, but that it would be really dumb for the copyright holder (in this case, whoever holds the copyright on music by the Black-Eyed Peas) to enforce. Then Title busts out a line that should be repeated often:

Protecting a copyright often seems to fly in the face of good business.

Bingo. This is an argument we've been making for over a decade. There are many in both business and law who seem to assume that because you can enforce a right, it means that it always makes business sense to enforce that right. And yet, as we see over and over and over again, it's quite often not the case at all. In an awful lot of cases, very strong arguments can be made that the reverse is true and that protecting your copyright actually does a lot more damage than good.

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Filed Under: business, copyright

13 Comments

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Richard (profile), 7 Oct 2009 @ 3:27am

Who makes the decision
Probably these decisions are overly influenced by the legal department. It may not make business sense for the form overall - but it makes "business sense" for the legal department.

Firms should set their policies such that

"Total losses from Patent/copyright Infringment"= Legal Costs

Anything else is clearly non-optimal.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Oct 2009 @ 4:08am

copyright appears to be the right to copy online
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David Canton, 7 Oct 2009 @ 4:35am

protecting copyright vs good business
That is absolutely correct. There are many legal issues where I view our jobs as lawyers is to put clients in the best legal position they can be in - which then gives them the most options from a business perspective.

Another example is having e-commerce sites set up so if there is an error (such as monitor mistakenly advertised for $1.99 instead of $199.) the vendor can refuse to sell it for that price to those who have ordered and paid. At least that gives the vendor the option to decide from a business perspective whether it wants to refuse the sales - or allow the sales as a gesture of good will and promotion.
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..., 7 Oct 2009 @ 5:05am

Re: protecting copyright vs good business
Bad example.
That is not similar in any way to the topic at hand.
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..., 7 Oct 2009 @ 5:06am

Re:
It has nothing to do with online, but you can probably patent the online part of it.
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Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 7 Oct 2009 @ 7:18am

Lobbying
But of course it is good business sense to do what the laws allow. They're the ones that paid the lobbyists and politicians to write the laws!
/sarcasm
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DS, 7 Oct 2009 @ 8:53am

Ugh
Well, there's on copyright on the concept of bad music, that's for sure.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 7 Oct 2009 @ 9:29am

Re: Lobbying
"But of course it is good business sense to do what the laws allow."

And that's the problem with having lawyers make business decisions.
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Thomas, 7 Oct 2009 @ 10:36am

Good Business sense...
is an oxymoron in today's world.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 Oct 2009 @ 3:26pm

Protecting a copyright often seems to fly in the face of good business.

More like protecting a copyright seems to go against people who want everything for nothing.

I am not entirely sure how everything for nothing would be considered good business.
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another mike (profile), 7 Oct 2009 @ 4:17pm

remember scrabulous
I thought we already coined a term for this? When protecting your legal rights is a bad business decision. We were calling it the Scrabulous Effect in honor of that little Facebook game that Hasbro tried to crush but ended up having it blow up in their face.
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Anonymous Coward, 8 Oct 2009 @ 9:24am

Re:
Look, a straw man. Stay away from fire.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Oct 2009 @ 10:00pm

Re:
Try telling that to a best buy or circuit city that just made bank for the entire year because they drew in huge crowd with near-giveaways on 'black friday'
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