The digital age has thrown all sorts of complexity into media transactions — the purchase, license, transfer, or permission to experience recorded audio or video works. This fabulous label from an early recording shows that the issue is nothing new (found on this blog entry through BoingBoing).
Even back 1906, record companies were pushing the idea that you don’t buy a record, you buy the right to listen to the music encoded on the record. In fact, the label doesn’t call it a purchase at all, but a lease:
This record is leased solely for the purpose of producing sound directly from the record and for no other purpose; all other rights under the licensor’s patents under which this record is made are expressly reserved in the licensor.
It may sound like semantics, but the issue lies at the foundation of the many media industries (some of which I’ve touched on it before). We’re used to thinking of the contents and the container as the same thing (”I just bought a new CD,” ”I loved the film so much that I bought the DVD”). And with many cultural objects, the business model and the law support that assumption (books and records are covered under the first-sale doctrine within copyright law, allowing the purchaser of to sell or give away a ”particular, lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been obtained”).
With digital technology, however, the only way to sell or give away a piece of music or a moving image (from your iPod or hard drive for example) is to make a copy of it. This gets copyright attorneys all a-quiver. The vagaries make media managers freaky, as well, since the rules and rights of commercial transactions define how most industries work (or don’t work).
In 1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company hoped to define the nature of the recorded audio transaction. In 1908, copyright law redefined it for them. Who knows how long it will take for the law and the marketplace to untangle the nature of cultural transactions in a digital world.
The essential difficulty with copyright protection is philosophical, not legal. It involves making subtle distinctions between a thing’s FORM and its SUBSTANCE. Since this has been one of the most central questions of philosophy for at least 2,600 years, I doubt that it will ever be resolved conclusively any time some.