版权保护与创作、文化发展的关系

将版权的功能等同于鼓励创作,是对现实的过度简化。从作者的角度来看,个体的创作受到多重动机的驱使,版权只扮演着一个相对边缘性的角色。版权更重要的向度是在产业领域,其作用是在媒介稀缺和信息传递依附价值传递的产业环境下,确保知识的大规模商品化得以顺利进行,后者在客观上提高了社会知识的存量和传播范围,同时强化和扩大了作者作为一种职业的地位和范围。当前的媒介充裕和创作传播手段的分散化,催生了大众化创作,并使其成为自媒体时代公众之间重要的对话交流形式。同时,互联网的零边际成本和平台的网络效应与版权相结合,提高了版权人垄断定价的能力和网络版权的市场集中度。版权与文化繁荣的关系,需要在新的信息社会的背景下进行类型化分析。一个宽松的文化发展环境、以产业政策为主导的规模化大市场、低成本的知识要素自由流动以及国家的支持和反垄断介入,是目前我国进一步实现文化发展与繁荣的必由之路。

Copyright Protection and the Prosperity of Literary Creation and Cultural Development

To treat the function of the copyright regime as encouraging creation is an oversimplification of the reality. From the perspective of an individual creator, authorship is motivated by multiple factors, and copyright is only a relatively marginal one among them. By contrast, the more important role played by copyright is to ensure the large-scale commodification of knowledge in the industrial field where media is scarce and information transmission depends on value transmission. In such a domain, copyright regime in history had greatly increased the stock and expanded the scope of transmission of social knowledge and strengthened the position of the author as a profession. After entering into the information age, media becomes abundant and the means of communication have been decentralized to the commons, making the “We-Media” an important form of dialogue and communication between netizens. The combination of the zero marginal cost of the Internet and the network effect of the platform with the copyright has enhanced the monopoly pricing capacity of the copyrighter and the market concentration of the Internet copyright. As a result, the relationship between copyright and cultural prosperity needs further typified analysis under the new circumstance. Anyway, a relatively tolerant environment for cultural development, a large-scale market powered by industrial policies, and the free flow of low-cost knowledge elements, coupled with government’s support and anti-trust intervention, are the ways to further realize cultural prosperity in current China.