A．it in fact protects a few celebrities.B．it covers the……
TEXT C
The idea that government
should regulate intellectual property through copyrights and patents is
relatively recent in human history, and the precise details of what intellectual
property is protected for how long vary across nations and occasionally change.
There are two standard sociological justifications for patents or copyrights:
They reward creators for their labor, and they encourage greater creativity.
Both of these are empirical claims that can be tested scientifically and could
be false in some realms.
Consider music. Star performers existed
before the 20th century, such as Franz Liszt and Niccolo Paganini, but mass
media produced a celebrity system promoting a few stars whose music was not
necessarily the best or most diverse. Copyright provides protection for
distribution companies and for a few celebrities, thereby helping to support the
industry as currently defined, but it may actually harm the majority of
performers. This is comparable to Anatole France’s famous irony, "The law, in
its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under
bridges." In theory, copyright covers the creations of celebrities and
obscurities equally, but only major distribution companies have the resources to
defend their property rights in court. In a sense, this is quite fair, because
nobody wants to steal unpopular music, but by supporting the property rights of
celebrities, copyright strengthens them as a class in contrast to anonymous
musicians.
Internet music file sharing has become a significant
factor in the social lives of children, who download bootleg music tracks for
their own use and to give as gifts to friends. If we are to believe one recent
poll done by a marketing firm rather than social scientists, 48%o of American
Internet users aged 12 to 17 had downloaded music files in the past month. In so
doing, they violate copyright laws, and criminologists would hypothesize they
thereby learn contempt for laws in general. A poll by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project found that two-thirds of an estimated 35 million Americans
who download music files do not care whether they are copyrighted. Thus, on the
level of families, ending copyright could be morally as well as economically
advantageous. On a much higher level, however, the culture-exporting nations
(notably the United States) could stand to lose, although we cannot really
predict the net balance of costs and benefits in the absence of proper research.
We do not presently have good cross-national data on file sharing or a
well-developed theoretical framework to guide research on whether copyright
protection supports cultural imperialism versus enhancing the positions of
diverse cultures in the global marketplace.
It will not be easy
to test such hypotheses, and extensive economic research has not conclusively
answered the question of whether the patent system really promotes innovation.
Vie will need many careful, sharp focus studies of well-formed hypotheses in
specific industries and sectors of life. For example, observational and
interview research can uncover the factors that really promote cultural
innovation among artists of various kinds and determine the actual consequences
for children of Internet peer-to-peer file sharing.
Copyright of music may harm the majority of performers in that ______.
A．it in fact protects a few celebrities.
B．it covers the creations of most people.
C．it forbids the rich as well as the poor.
D．it doesn’t allow the mass to steal music.
