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how do you Protect artists?
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Second, even if such a list did exist, it would be trivial to defeat,
simply by introducing small changes to the infringing copies, as
spammers do with the text of their messages in order to evade
spam filters.
In fact, the spam wars have some important lessons to teach
us here. Like copyrighted works, spams are infinitely varied and
more are being created every second. Any company that could
identify spam messages — including permutations and variations
on existing spams — could write its own ticket to untold billions.
Some of the smartest, most dedicated engineers on the planet
devote every waking hour to figuring out how to spot spam before
it gets delivered. If your inbox is anything like mine, you’ll agree
that the war is far from won.
If the YouTubes of the world are going to prevent infringe-
ment, they’re going to have to accomplish this by hand-inspecting
every one of the tens of billions of blog posts, videos, text files,
music files, and software uploads made to every single server on
the Internet.
And not just cursory inspections, either — these inspections
will have to be undertaken by skilled, trained specialists (who’d
better be talented linguists, too — how many English speakers
can spot an infringement in Urdu?).
Such experts don’t come cheap, which means that you can an-
ticipate a terrible denuding of the fertile jungle of Internet host-
ing companies that are primary means by which tens of millions
of creative people share the fruits of their labor with their fans
and colleagues.
It would be a great Sovietization of the world’s digital printing
presses, a contraction of a glorious anarchy of expression into a
regimented world of expensive and narrow venues for art.
It would be a death knell for the kind of focused, noncommer-
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