The Shift from the Copyright Regime to Free Culture

Abstract

We live in a time when YouTube is a parallel of the TV and the cellphones of the radio. A time when everyone has access to artistic works of music, photography and videography at their fingertips. A characteristic of the current technological age is that most people possess and transact property, i.e, Intellectual Property in and through their hands most of the time. But the more interesting fact is that most of them are copies of copyright infringing copies. Seldom do people buy CDs and DVDs with the exception of a few. Entire discographies of musical artists are available for download from file-sharing sites. When the internet was gaining popularity the most spoken word at that time was Yahoo! Now it is giving way to Google, Facebook, YouTube and Torrents. With the exception of people who run firms and of institutions people do not bother much to buy digital products, especially, software. Many arguments, including high prices of such software have been raised for such acts downloading cracked and warez versions. Moreover, in this age of computer experts and software gurus, a wide range of applications and software are available for free of cost and free of copyrights. When software ranging from Operating Systems to Digital Audio Workstations are available as freeware and when the practice of millions of users downloading cracked versions of proprietory software is rampant, does the copyright regime have a future? This paper discusses this paradigm shift from the copyright regime to free culture.