Copyright law in the United States is built around the notion that ideas themselves are not protected, only the physical expression of them. A conversation, a recited story, or an improvisation cannot be copyrighted because it lacks physical form. A musical performance cannot be copyrighted until it is recorded. The law protects the particular expression of an idea and, until recently, that entailed making some sort of container for it, in the form of a book, movie, painting, or architectural drawing. The physical container locked the contents into a fixed, inalterable, and difficult–to-copy format. Architectural ideas are protected by copyright only when they are assembled into a design and presented in a physical medium such as a drawing or model.

The invention of the printing press dramatically increased the rate of literacy, because the availability of books gave people a reason to learn to read. So the ease of copying brought on by this technological change greatly increased the demand for authors. Observers have likened the Internet to Gutenberg’s invention and predict a golden age for creators of all kinds, with more opportunities for creativity, individual expression, and varied forms of distribution.

Instead of worrying too much about protecting your services from copiers, think about how you can deliver the most value to clients by improving services or by offering new ones. Let the Internet be an opportunity rather than a threat. Suppose, for example, you can increase the value of your services by making them more accessible to the client or easier to use. If you begin offering a project extranet as part of basic services, for example, your clients should be willing to pay more for the greater access to their information you have provided them.

What Is an Original in the Digital Age?

In architecture, we have the long-cherished notion of an original. So strong is the hold of paper that building officials routinely ask for an original drawing that has been stamped and wet-signed by the architect. This notion is not easily transferrable to the digital age; there may be no real difference between an original and copy. Thankfully, the concept of “record drawings” lives on the form of CD-ROMs.These can be snapshots of a project taken at a given point in time, and they cannot be altered. And digital signatures, such as can easily be added to architectural drawings with Adobe Acrobat, have the full force of the law. Meanwhile, the digital rubber stamp waits to be invented.

Versioning

In the 1970s, the Grateful Dead allowed fans to tape live concerts freely. The result was a worldwide fan base driven by the so-called private tapes. Hearing a tape persuaded music fans to attend concerts, and attending concerts made the fans want to buy albums. The Dead were practicing what has come to be known as versioning: giving away a limited form of a product in order to increase demand for the higher-quality version that must be purchased. The Grateful Dead became one of the world’s most successful rock bands by in effect giving away a low qualityversion of their product. It cost them nothing, and it stimulated sales of recordings and concert tickets. Many companies have discovered that versioning is often the best way to create demand for a product, now that the Internet has reduced the marginal cost of reproducing information to practically nothing. For example, The New York Times offers free access to most of the newspaper on its Web site. What does it get in return? Visitors must register, giving the Times and its advertisers valuable information about customers. Moreover, although the basic content is free, visitors who want premium services must pay for them. For example, although searching the Times archives is free, there is a charge for downloading articles. The basic version increases the demand for the premium version by making people aware of it. Doom, the gory shoot-em-up computer game, began in 1993 by giving away the first few levels of the game. Fifteen million people downloaded it for free, became hooked, and were glad to pay for higher levels when they reached the market.

Some architects who are clever with their Web sites use a form of versioning. Instead of trying to impress visitors with pictures of beautiful award-winning work, they place articles and case studies on-line, in effect giving away some of their expertise in the hopes of hooking a potential client who needs more. Firms with specialized practices can create a demand for what they do by giving potential clients enough information to discover that they need the firm’s services. By widely circulating a sample of your work, you may actually fuel demand for the higher-quality version of it, for which you can charge a fee. An architect who offers house plans on-line might make some basic plans available as a free download (it costs nothing) but charge a hefty fee for customizing the plans to a particular site. Or a higher-value version of the same house plans might come with the rights of repeated use. The value your clients derive from your work has to do with their relationship with you and the information and services you provide.

For service firms, the Internet is both an opportunity and a threat. It’s a threat because it effectively globalizes virtually every type of business. With so much information available with easy access, clients will find it much easier to form new supplier relationships. You may find yourself competing not with just the firm around the block but with companies throughout the region and world. It’s an opportunity because it affords the potential to learn from your clients and end users, to interact closely with them, and to customize your services to suit each particular client and project. For every creator of intellectual property, whether music, literature, films, software, or architectural design, the Internet has changed the way people assign value to what they do. No longer does the work product itself have much intrinsic value—an MP3 file downloaded from the Internet sounds every bit as good as a CD you bought at a store. The Web version of Newsweek has just as much information as the printed version on the newsstand.

For architects, who have been trained to esteem the beautiful object, whether a drawing, a model, or a piece of furniture, it’s hard to let go. But soon, if our work product has any physical manifestation at all, it will be temporary and valueless. Our ideas will become part of the great river of digital content that flows on the Internet. In his article, “The Economy of Ideas,” John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: Whether you think of yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market—a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time. The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively.

-from Chapter 12 of Communication and Design with the Internet

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