Page:The digital public domain.pdf/82

Rh activity or business and devote a portion — often a very large portion — of their spare time to creating. These activities may give them a bit of extra income, professional credit and recognition which may have positive spill-over effects in their main line or just fun (or a combination of the three). Even when the creators operating along the short route are professionally engaged in the creation of works, which is usually not the case, their business model is often based on income flows different from simply the sale of copies. There is a shift whereby even singers and songwriters increasingly rely on performances, tours, endorsements, merchandising and the like rather than sales of albums and tracks.

This is the business model that the Grateful Dead pioneered, possibly taking a clue from open source software and IBM, and is currently expanding to an increasing number of businesses. Economist Paul Krugman made the case that the demise of reliance on an income based on “hard” copies was being generalized and, making his case, quipped that in the long run we will all be the Grateful Dead. What is important for creators engaged along the short route is that their work can be disseminated as widely as possible, on two conditions: first, that the work is correctly attributed to them, and second, that the creators may, if they so choose, reserve the right to prevent third parties from making a commercial profit out of their work unless this is agreed to by the creator herself.

3.2 The rules

If this is so, then what may currently be needed is a new kind of copyright, which we may, if you wish, label Copyright 2.0. I submit that the new system would have four basic features. Old copyright, or Copyright 1.0, would still be available; but it would have to be claimed for by the creator at the onset, for example by inserting the old copyright notice, ©, as the US did in the past, before accessing the Berne Convention. If no notice was