Years ago, I wrote a column about copyright on the Internet that became one of my most popular posts, drawing ridiculous traffic to my website for years.
It helped that I gave it the title “The Real Slim Shady” and that, due to a fluke of Google’s search algorithm, it ranked on the first page of search results for that phrase. Never mind that the millions of people looking for Eminem’s hit song were probably disappointed to find some Internet pundit’s think piece on copyright — it was traffic, baby, and it was good!
That was one of my first lessons on SEO. The next, more painful lesson came a year or two later when I switched to a new blog hosting platform, which meant every post had a new URL – and I didn’t set up redirects for the old URLs. I lost the search ranking and all that traffic went away forever.
If you want to help dry my tears, you can copy and paste this link onto any website you own. Remember to include the link to my site:
If enough of you do that, maybe, someday, my search ranking will recover. 😭😭
But this is not a post about SEO! I reread my “Slim Shady” post recently and was pleasantly surprised to find that much of what it talked about is surprisingly applicable today.
I don’t want to abuse the word “prescient,” but this now-25-year-old column was definitely pretty forward-looking.
As I wrote then, “there will always be some technology giving copyright lawyers fits, because like it or not, the Internet is all about copying stuff.”
Yep. Still true today.
I wrote:
“Consider email, the single most-used application on the Net. You don't ever really "send" a message when you use email. Instead, you make a chain of copies. When you hit the Send button, your ISP's or company's mail server makes a copy of the message. Another mail server, somewhat closer to your message's destination, gets yet another copy, and then another server, then another, and so on until a copy arrives at the recipient's mail server. When that person downloads their message, they make one final copy on their own hard drive, and there it is – the message has "arrived." Except, unlike a letter, the email message hasn't really traveled, it's merely spawned a handful of copies.
“A similar principle holds for much of the Internet's underlying infrastructure. It's copies all the way down.”
The conclusion seemed clear then, as it is clear now. Shutting down Napster, or any other service premised on the free sharing and copying of “intellectual property,” is doomed to failure. If I'm determined to share an artist’s MP3 track, or an author’s book, or someone’s dance video, there’s always going to be a way for me to do it.
“Ultimately, if content can be copied immediately, perfectly, and distributed globally at essentially zero cost, then the economic value of a copy drops to zero, and copyrights become worthless. That means content producers and publishers need to find another way of making money from their creative efforts.”
My suggestion, and it was admittedly a bit wacky, was that it’s fruitless to try and stop copying on the internet. Instead, authors, musicians, and content publishers who want to protect their work should embrace the abundance of copies, but increase the value of trusted sources (themselves) by polluting the internet with crappy copies of their work.
In other words, people could download a copy anywhere, but if the odds are high that it will be a poor copy (or a complete imposter), they’ll have a big incentive to go to the source — the creator or publisher — to ensure that they’re getting the real thing. The real Slim Shady, in other words.
As a defensive strategy, polluting the web with poor imitations of one’s own work seems naive and fruitless.
Fortunately, creators today don’t have to do that. They have generative AI to do it for them.
In a world of infinite content, most of it will be mediocre at best or perhaps even complete gibberish. Borges recognized this long before the internet age with his 1941 story, “The Library of Babel.”
GenAI has evolved past the gibberish stage, but most of what it produces is irredeemably mediocre. It’s an imitation of vast quantities of human content, so, by definition, it is unlikely to be truly innovative or great.
You want original content? Go to the source. Form a relationship with a human or a human-centered organization and follow their work. Sign up for their newsletter, follow them on Bluesky, or subscribe to their YouTube channel.
As I wrote in 2001:
“In other words, although there's no longer any economic value in controlling the making and distributing of copies, there is still economic value in the identity of the musician, writer, artist, or programmer. …
“And as authentication grows in importance, we may need to replace copyright laws with laws governing the use and authentication of identities. … Perhaps something akin to "identity right" or "author right" will come to replace copyright.”
Is this what we need today – some way to authenticate ourselves as genuine humans? Let me know in the comments.
And go watch Eminem’s song. It’s still a banger.
