Copyright in the real world

Although there has been virtually no coverage of the event, I’m assured that in July the UK government ratified an EU directive which, from November just past, increased the period of time when sound recordings are subject to copyright from 50 years to 70.

This is a case of expanding the barn after the horses have all bolted. Completely absurd.

What’s needed is a complete rethink of intellectual property law in the real world we live in now.

Hemming and hawing over Diet Coke

Here is another example of fast-following being better than leading.

Twenty years ago, it became clear that there was a really major market out there for diet cola. And regular Coke had the reputation for being stuffed with calories.

The Coca-Cola Company had sold for many years a brand called TAB – and the reason that the company gave it a separate name, far from Coke, was that it tasted foul.

So the challenge was to produce a good-tasting product with zero calories. First to market was a local US brand, Royal Crown. It tasted good and consumers liked it. But the truth was that they were faced with a powerful global competitor who could obliterate them quite easily.

So after much hemming and hawing – it seemed to take years – Coca-Cola finally launched Diet-Coke (Coca-Cola Lite in many markets), which built massive sales everywhere, including in Australia, where my ad agency, Lintas, handled the launch.

I think the lesson is not to go up against a much bigger competitor with your new product if they can blow you out of the water so easily.

In that case, you’ll need an important aspect of your product or brand that’s either hard to copy, or, better still, has some IP protection.

The strangulating undergrowth of IP law

A paper given by Dr Lucy Montgomery of Queensland University of Technology at last week’s Cultural and Creative Industries Symposium (at the House of Lords in London) started me thinking again about the whole business of intellectual property law and its negative role in our society now.

German historian, Eckhard Höffner, argues that Germany’s Great Leap Forward in the second half of the nineteenth century – from agrarian society to one of the world leaders industrially – sprang from the country’s lack of copyright laws. Thus ideas and knowledge spread quickly, spawning continuous innovation and entrepreneurial activity.

The same situation – lack of effective intellectual property constraints - applied to the USA in the same period and to Britain’s own leadership of the Industrial Revolution in the previous half century (although, as Höffner points out, the introduction of copyright law in Britain in 1710 did have something of a crippling effect, even then).

Now, of course, Europe and America are both enmeshed in IP laws of all kinds, all intended to protect (and enrich) originators, but at the same time placing comprehensive barriers in the path of innovative scientists, engineers, artists, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs and companies.

In the twenty-first century, the economic survival of the West in the face of intense competition from the East will depend on Europe’s and America’s ability to innovate. At the moment, the game is being played on a very uneven playing field.

India, China and other Asian countries have limited frameworks of intellectual property law, and what exists is scarcely enforced. The West, on the other hand, constantly extends the tentacles of IP restriction.

Europe and America, thinking that they have the moral and intellectual high ground, expend their energies nowadays seeking to persuade countries in Asia to adopt Western standards. There is little evidence that this strategy is working (or will ever work).

What is needed is a complete re-think. The West should start to dismantle the strangulating undergrowth of IP law, freeing up innovators and artists, entrepreneurs and organisations alike, to compete again on a global stage on an equal footing.