Creative work makes for slippery private property online

You might have to go back to Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to find a publishing technology as disruptive. The Internet can reproduce content and distribute it almost anywhere at nearly light speed. Call it the perfect copying machine - with an out tray to everyone.

And that's the trouble. For any creator of "intellectual property" - text, software, music, videos, and so on - the Internet is challenging the fundamental notion of who owns the content and how it can be used. This week, the issue reached the United States Supreme Court in a case that may go a long way toward deciding what rights creators have. The issue isn't clear cut.

Protect the creators too much and it may inhibit technological progress and chill artistic expression, some argue. Others say the technology and culture of sharing electronic files has made the philosophy of "all rights reserved" obsolete.

What's needed, some observers urge, is a new copyright that recognizes a middle ground between all rights and no rights to a work of art.

In court, the big music and film companies "can win every single case from now until the cows come home, but they cannot put the genie back in the bottle because people have discovered that they have the tools of participation," says Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners, a think tank in New York. What the Internet has done is wrest away from a few producers the ability to sell scarce goods to a large group of consumers through expensive and highly controlled channels, he adds, such as when three commercial networks controlled what TV viewers saw in the 1960s. Now everyone with access to a computer has "the tools to produce as much media - if not more - than they consume."

Indeed, the Internet hasn't only made copying easy, it also has helped foster a culture in which some artists create new work by literally reusing or remixing the work of others. Hip-hop music, built on the idea of "sampling" the beats or sounds of earlier music, is the most obvious of several examples. "The very works that we seek to copyright are built from found objects of other cultural products," Mr. Zolli says.

Some say this remix world demands a new attitude toward copyright, one that still respects the artist's need to make a living, but acknowledges that a carrot works better than a stick to pay the bills.

That was John Buckman's idea in 2003 when he founded Magnatune.com, an independent record label that sells music through online downloads and CDs and also licenses music for both commercial and noncommercial use. His business plan was simple: Let people listen to the music all they want for free over the Internet. If they like an album so much they want to own it, they can pay a range of prices from $5 to $18 per album, which they can choose. (On average, he says, buyers are paying $8.20.)

Whatever they pay, half goes directly to the musician, a much larger share than in conventional record deals. The company has 180 artists signed up, most of whom produce music in niche categories, such as classical or new age. So far, no one's getting rich. The highest earners, Mr. Buckman says, make a little more than $20,000 a year, barely enough for a couple of Britney Spears's wardrobe changes.

The company's slogan is "We Are Not Evil." That's a direct swipe at major record labels, whose pricing policies and crackdown on illegal file-swapping have angered many. That activity, known as peer-to-peer (or p2p) file-sharing, is shrinking a bit, and legal downloading from sites such as Apple's iTunes music store is increasing, according to a recent poll from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But it's unclear whether illegal swapping really is decreasing, or whether respondents are reluctant to admit to it for fear of being sued by music companies.

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