How the internet has made copyright protection murkier

What you need to know:

  • Take, for example, a book published and launched in print today. Within a week, an illegal digital copy will be flying across the internet, being downloaded for free
  • An illegally circulating music video may land the artist a contract to perform live at a series of real-world events

Kenya has a comprehensive CopyrightAct that aims to protect the intellectual rights of creators and authors in the literary, music and software industries.

The philosophy behind copyright is to create a framework to compensate authors and innovators for their works, the idea being that if the creators do not have a sustainable source of income, they are unlikely to be around long enough to create their next cycle of innovation.

The creator or author of a book, video or software would expect consumers to pay for it so that he or she is incentivised to create the next edition. Illegal or unauthorised reproduction and distribution of the works would deny the author rightful compensation.

The Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) is mandated by law to be the custodian and protector of the intellectual rights of authors in Kenya. Indeed looking at its database of protected works, one can tell that to some extent, it is trying to deliver on this mandate.

The challenge is that with the Internet, the dynamics of managing intellectual property rights become extremely complex and often beyond the capacity of copyright bodies.

Take, for example, a book published and launched in print today. Within a week, an illegal digital copy will be flying across the Internet, being downloaded for free. There isn’t much KECOBO may do to stop the illegal downloads.

EVOLVING MODELS

In developed economies, there is legislation or regulation known as intermediary liability, whereby Internet service providers (ISPs) are expected to participate in copyright administration by way of blocking illegal downloads.

This, again, is not fully effective because of the global nature of the Internet. A Kenyan ISP may oblige and block illegal downloads, but the same copy of the book will remain available for download on several other sites outside Kenya, unless blocking is global.

Furthermore, implicit within any blocking instruction are questions of privacy. For an ISP to block content from their users, it must implement a mechanism that can inspect what they are downloading. Technically, this is known as a deep-packet inspection mechanism and is not permitted in many jurisdictions.

ISPs are supposed to provide a highway for transmitting information, but do not have an automatic right to inspect the contents since that would begin to violate personal privacy.

A final challenge for digital copyright frameworks is that financial models for compensation keep evolving. Many authors and artists tend to benefit indirectly from illegally downloaded copies.

Many artists have gained new customers through illegal channels. One may read portions of an illegally downloaded book and subsequently buy the official hardcopy edition.

Similarly, an illegally circulating music video may land its creator a contract to perform live at a series of real-world events. The artist may actually earn more from the live events than they would otherwise have earned from restrictive digital sales.

The world is moving towards what is known as Copyleft management of digital rights in order to accommodate these new realities to digital copyright. Perhaps it is time our own copyright laws woke up to these realities.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Email: [email protected], Twitter: @jwalu