Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Why free software exists: Part 2

Distribution and its problems

Let say you are a good singer. You want to be paid for any song you sing, right? You want people to recognise you through your song. And therefore you go to the studio, do your recording, get publicists, and sell copies of your album. Your publishers make the copies for you. If the recording company has made profit from selling copies of your album, then they pay you a good sum. But what if they sold copies behind your back and made off with the profit? Worse, what if someone else got hold of your album and sold copies of it? What if they sold it in a fashion that doesn't even credit you even remotely? Your identity is at a crisis; people might use some other name (preferably theirs) rather than your name even though you sang the song, and the other person may have not.

Would you want to sing again?

Clearly not. But as long you have a copyright you can at least fight back. You can go ahead and claim that your copyright was infringed (your identity corrupted) and then take some legal action on the other person. I guess these are truly what copyrights are meant for. But there is another side to this; you have to see it from the publishers angle.

The publisher's motive is usually to make profit; and this is ensured as long as he or she can sell more copies. But what if someone else had the power to make a copy of the album and sell or distribute that for free or a lower rate. Clearly the publisher is at a loss. No one would want to buy copies from him. And slowly the publisher's business comes to a close.

This is again where copyrights come to play. It a copyright says something like:-

This is your copy. Unauthorised production of copies, broadcasting, and/or performance is prohibited.

The above statement sums up all I've said above. But now, consider the publisher's perspective again. Although public performance or broadcasting is illegal as per the copyright law, people still continue to do these things. It's a very common occurrence here; any marriage function I go to people play the music loud. And that's not all; people also make copies by themselves. We live in the world where we possess the technology to produce copies in short time. There is a proliferation going on in public; we can't really check it.

Until here I've been talking about music; but you must realise software is not much different. These things happen with software packages too. And it's not ever a rare phenomenon. Another good example other than software packages is books. You can get to buy books from side shops which are mainly unauthorised. They try to sell the books for a lower rate. It may not be of good quality however, but people go for these books. So in turn people are engaged in the business of making illegal copies of books and selling them behind the publishers back. It's a loss for the publisher; he can't sell his copies. No one would buy them.

The act of infringing the copyright is called piracy or copyright theft. But really who seems to be at loss here. The author isn't usually at loss! He at least gets the kudos for his work. It's really the publishers who are at real stake. In book piracy cases pirates usually print copies preserving the authors name as well as the publishers name. This way both gets recognised. If it were not so, then the pirates are in for real trouble. However this may not be the real reason why pirates are doing such a thing. They probably think the people who buy the book are clever. They won't buy books from unfamiliar authors or publishers.

Distribution poses to be a problem as far as software is concerned. Software cannot be distributed unless it is copied in a sense. The software has to be installed for first use and in this sense it is equivalent to copying. It is therefore that you might see most software licenses prohibit distribution. Books or music cds don't restrict distribution because that way it serves the purpose of what the book was actually made for. This is the reason why you see libraries lending books for people to read.

We can never have software libraries! Because most licenses prohibit copying and distribution. But yet we still see that copies are being made; they are being distributed. We have no control on this. Whether the purpose or motive behind this phenomenon is good or evil it will go on. And what more, know that this statement will be a major blow to all proprietary license holders, but the only reason why proprietary software packages are being popular are because of such things happening everyday.