Slashdot Mirror
The End of Innovation?
Simone writes: "2001 has been a bad year not just for dot-coms but also for people interested in preserving the public's right to fair use of copyright materials. From the shutdown of Napster and the DeCSS case to the prosecution of Dmitry Sklyarov, federal prosecutors and U.S. courts have acted in support of copyright interests and against the public's ability to use technology to secure fair-use rights. OpenP2P.com editor Richard Koman talks about these turns of events with Lawrence Lessig." Not particularly coincidentally, Lessig has a new book coming out on this very topic.
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean that if I took it, you know longer have it.
These debates over semantics are tiresome, and unproductive. The result doesn't mean anything -- it neither proves that an infringement isn't wrongful, nor does it prove that an infringement is evil. I think it is fairly clear that infringement is probably malum prohibitum (wrong because prohibited) rather than malum in se (prohibited because it is wrong. But once again, so what?
Strictly speaking, however, the quoted remark above is wrong. Dictionary definitions support the use of the verb "to steal" to embrace misappropriation of a work of authorship. On the other hand, so what? Just because a word can be linguistically used properly doesn't mean that it "proves" that one use of the verb "to steal" denotes the same form of evil as another use of verb "to steal." Sure, the denotation is correct, but a connotation equating it with, say, theft of a diamond is wrong.
More significantly, stealing one of Jon Katz' works is quite different from, and less wrong, than stealing my thunder, or stealing away to marry my daughter. (Or, while with her, attempting to steal a kiss).
From a legal perspective, the remarks above may be technically correct, although, indeed, forms of theft for which the taking of untangible copyrighted works under some circumstances. It is difficult to "steal" something intangible, just as it is difficult to "steal" real estate. So what? The appropriation or unauthorized exercise of exclusive rights of another in such property, however denominated, is actionable and, in some cases, criminal.
That aside, my Webster's Third New International includes definitions of stealing that supports the theft-name-callers. So at least one dictionary proves the contrary point. But, once again, so what?
Here it is -- copyright is at least malum prohibitum, is probably not malum in se. It is certainly actionable, and sometimes criminal.
One really doesn't need to inquire much deeper. You would be wrong, denotatively, to flame at someone who calls an infringer one who stole a work, but so what? You would probably be wrong, connotatively, to demagogue as the person making the claim, but so what?
2001 has been a bad year not just for dot-coms but also for people interested in preserving the public's right to fair use of copyright materials.
.ph0x
It's also been a bad year for the stock market, most all technology fields and on top of all that, my sex life is down 5 points... go figure, I'm still blaming el nino.
---
ps -aux | grep mind
The whole slashdot concept of DVD's is pathetic. BUY A DVD PLAYER to watch your movies. 99% of the world bought dvd's because of the technology and advancements over VHS. YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THOSE ACHIEVEMENTS and technological improvements. SO FREAKING WHAT if you want watch your DVD's for free. You didn't write the codec, produce the technology, market the products and standardize the industry on formats. That comes to a huge cost and well, DVD's are so awesome for home theater that i don't mind paying that cost.
The price of the DVD and/or player isn't the issue. DVD's aren't priced much higher than VHS [in some cases they can actually be less than a comparable VHS tape]. Likewise, the players are now at rather reasonable prices, about where VCR's stabalized to after they became common [incidentally, VCRs are now DIRT cheap]. The issue is fair use violations [it is not possible, under current law, to legally copy ANY portion of a DVD, even a small excerpt for use in a classroom.] The other issue is region encoding [I can buy tapes from Europe, Asia, etc that play fine in my VCR so long as they are the right format {VHS}. Yet, DVD's from each area may or may not play depending on the region encoding]. Region encoding is, flat out, screwing the consumer. The only possible reason for it is so people in region A have no choice but to pay region A prices and can only get films at region A release dates. Currently, especially for those of us in the US, this is not much of an issue, but the potential is there for a great deal of abuse, and it would be best to nip that in the bud. Lastly, there have been reports of DVDs the refuse to fast forward [one of the wonderful points about DVDs is the ability to jump straight to a scene as opposed to winding tape] through trailors. On rental only copies, maybe I can see this, a way to offset the discount rental places must get, but for consumer purchased discs? I think most would agree if I buy it I ought to be able to watch however I like, be it straight through, no trailors, or the last 5 minutes only. I paid my money, it ought to be my choice.
Basicly, the DVD opposition isn't about copying. Even with today's huge hard drives, you still couldn't put too many onto them at DVD quality, and besides, to download them off the net would take forever even at broadband speeds. The issue is consumers losing rights they have been entitled to and enjoyed since the dawn of home entertainment devices.
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
This isn't a question of 'the end of innovation' at all, except possibly in a Microsoftesque "Help! Stop the bad man! He's depriving me of my ability to innovate!" sort of a way. The issue is an entirely separate one, that of fair use and the purpose and extent of IP rights.
There's nothing to stop people coming up with new and better ways of carrying out these same tasks, or entirely different tasks - the constraints that we're looking at here are primarily on reverse engineering, which has never really struck me as being an integral part of innovation...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
When was the last time you heard about private individuals making major discoveries in the automobile industry?
Well, let's see. Last time I looked at power windows. Oh, and last time I saw a friend's home built sheet metal intake (30% Horsepower jump). Oh, and the college kid I met that fabricated a jig for easily adjusting holley carbs. What about the guy who came up with splitfire spark plugs? Yes, sometimes innovation happens in corperate labs. Sometimes it doesn't. Don't assume that every industry has to turn to corperate labs to get anything done.
Unbreakable encryption is a myth...
Not at all true. There is lots of unbreakable encryption. Aside from 4096 bit keys and the like, just use a one time pad. The problem is that as encryption gets stronger, it becomes inconveniant(sp?). People aren't willing to go that far out of their way, witness Circuit City's DivX. Cheaper (sort of) but too inconveniant. People probably won't be interested in calling the publisher or what have you to get unlock codes for their DVDs. What you wind up with is a balance between what the consumer wants (completely open and free access) and what the copyright holding corperation wants (complete lock down of the work). This balence leads to balence in other areas, including fair use. This is how a free market is supposed to work- the current IP laws are broken and stupid because they upset this balence.
How do we fix it? Personally, I submit that if we make copyright non-transferable most of this goes away. I tend to think that a copyright should only be held by the creator. It cannot be sold and transfered, even if the creator wanted to. Then if Metallica didn't want their music traded, fine. If Offspring did, fine. Sony (Offspring's label IIRC) would NOT be able to block Offspring from sharing their music, because Offspring would still own all of the rights. Sony would only be able to contract for the privelage of distributing The Offspring's fine music, rather than contracting to own it. This would, IMO, shift us back to sanity. Artists would be protected not only from people who wanted to copy and illegally distribute their work, but also from those who would seek to own and control their work. Consumers would be given more choice in the sense that if I didn't like Metallica's restrictions on distributing I could listen to MegaDeath (better than Metallica anyways but I digress...) As it is, If I don't like Sony's restrictions on distributing then I can't listen to a whole load of bands.
Politics, Culture, Food?
Why is this? Because of a loophole in copyright law that allows these records to be recorded as "hired works". A "hired work" is when someone asks you to write a song for them about x, y or z, etc., not when a record label says they will distribute your music.
An entire underground music community existed before Napster and will exist afterwards, sport.
Yes, and will the community get as much exposure with such a huge potential distribution method turned off for them? Read my other posts on this thread if you want to know how I feel about Napster (inc.).
No, they don't represent artists, and they've never claimed to.
Why then is that a major benefit listed by record labels when trying to sign independent artists?
You would do yourself a lot of good to actually educate yourself about the music industry.
Most of the above-mentioned independent artists which I reference are friends of mine, describing to me the trouble they have. Oh, and owners of small record labels which aren't part of the RIAA. As for protesting business practices, the only way to do that effectively is to put someone out of business. When the business practices go hand-in-hand with the law, there is little place to protest.
But that would take some foresight and empathy for the greater social welfare
The greater social welfare? Whose welfare? Just as there was an independent music community before the Internet, there was a flourishing music community before the Recording Industry.
When laws can be bought, social welfare goes out the window. And as for "Libertarian feelings", in what way are the opinions I've expressed here Libertarian? Private property is greatly espoused in the Libertarian philosophy. It would make more sense if you called my opinions (in this case at least) Commie-leftist propaganda.
As I've suggested elsewhere on this thread, you should read Thomas Jefferson's deliberation on copyright. It was intended to be a limited monopoly granted to an individual for a limited period of time. Individual. Limited. It was to encourage innovation. I don't see current copyright law and current recording industry business practices encouraging innovation in any way.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
But that's exactly the point: digital copying is a new thing, compared to physical world stuff. The cost of many goods and services are based on not simply the IP, but also production, printing, distribution costs which can be very significant. When you obliterate those costs, it's unreasonable not to expect prices to drop radically in line with the new lower cost of distributing the IP. The whole 'everything must be free' thing is simply an overshoot of a shift in value that DOES need to happen.
Copying copyrighted information is not stealing. Stealing would mean that if I took it, you know longer have it. This is blatantly false. Copyright infringement is a more accurate term, though far less emotive.
It is only human convention that keeps copyright around, not some law of nature. And, at present, the original motivations for copyright are being perverted in the current implementation, so civil disobedience is a valid response.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
At nearly the end of the interview, Lawrence Lessig makes the following statement:
copied directly from this article without permission, with all due credit, and with unknown intentions.
Yes. I think we should go back to the principles that defined us originally, which was about open societies with free people who should obey the law but you don't get them to obey the law by basically coding it so that they can't do anything different [italics added]. You get them to obey the law by making the law reasonable and getting people to be respectful of it, and that's the direction we ought to be going.
end quote
This statement interests me, because it seems that there is an even stronger statement to be made, namely that: Replacing the responsibility of the individual to obey the law with the inability of the individual to break the law not only encourages an ignorance of the law, but also encourages a lack of basic moral judgement.
Now for some justification.
Historically, moral philosophy has often considered the ability to reason practially about ethical and moral issues to be a sign of some maturity. Rousseau's Emile encourages this view especially with respect to children when it presents the advice that one not command a particular behavior from a child; rather, make it impossible for the child to misbehave. Similar thought has gone into modern society in every niche from electrical-outlet-covers to child-safety car-door locks. The underlying principle at work is that a child has not developed the practial reason required to go from an abstract commanded behavior pattern (Don't stick the scissors into the outlet) to the benefits (not getting electrocuted) without experimentation.
Very much simplified, in the case of persons without the ability to reason practically about ethical and moral issues (those who cannot understand *why* they should obey a guiding principle) technology is an oft-used preventative measure.
With respect to children, the profoundly impared, and other similar cases, no one argues that the use of technology to prevent a harmful outcome is innapropriate; however, I would argue that the continued use of technology to make impossible the breaking of a rule frees the faculty of reason from having any connection with that rule.
In other words, utilizing high technology to keep people from being able to commit a crime does not in any way educate the moral faculties of the people being so protected from their impulses. In fact, I would argue that through reliance on that protection, people become inherently less able to distinguish the moral reasoning behind the rule being enforced. Instead, it would be much like your telling me "It's illegal to fly by jumping up into the air and flapping your wings". Should you say that, I would give the moral reasoning behind it no thought simply because I can't accomplish the deed.
Certainly in such an imaginative case, giving the reasoning behind the law no thought would do no great harm; however, in a society where we are all in theory responsible for the health of our democracy (I seem to recall hearing that once with respect to the American legal/judical system) an inability to clearly reason about the morality and justification of the social contract under which we live spells the eventual end of that social contract.
Perhaps
it is better that way.
exactly which part of downloading mp3s without paying anyone a dime is "fair use"? I didn't think anyone actually believed that Napster was used for anything other than wholesale copyright infringement.
I think the "end of innovation" is going a bit far. Although no one wants to hear it, big corperations innovate too. I feel that the "little guy" gets stepped on all to often, but we tend to simply ignore the time and money large corperations spend on what is more or less innovation (so they can make more money)
Except the "known spammer" in this case was the entire MIT community!
No, it was the open relay that MIT was running. If someone is running a relay that takes all comers, and someone else is using it to send spam to my network, I'll ask the admin to deny relaying. If they won't, I'll blackhole it. If someone doesn't prevent their resources from using mine in a manner I don't want, I disallow them the right to use my resources.
The key point is I don't tell someone how to use their resources. If they want to allow relay, fine. I just won't allow them to use my resources.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Yes, there is a large amount of free and open material out there. However, this does not mean that Napster is either necessary or superior at delivering that material.
First, relatively few major artists encourage or allow bootlegging. Second, those bands which do invariably have vastly better organized websites and ftp sites dedicated exclusively to that pursuit. I am a DMB fan, and I would far prefer to go to from the dedicated ftp/www sites, where I can download entire/full/non-corrupt albums, than a disorganized system like napster, where anything I searched for (any time during its existence) would result largely in his COMMERCIAL recordings. Third, given that most of the legitmate uses are not from well known/signed artists and the fact that Napster's user base absolutely plummetted after they blocked the various signed artists, how can you reasonably claim that even a reasonable minority was using it for legitimate means?
I hear all this crap about protecting the little guy, well that's fine and good. But the little guys interests needs to be balanced against the interests of society at large (and the legal claims of, what is in economic terms, the real majority). When the vast majority of the use is for piracy and the minority can have their legitimate claims answered by alternative means, in a superior way nonetheless, why bother? Even if we accept P2P as being important, P2P does not necessarily mean that we need a system of total anarchy, whereby any content is allowed. Napster could have implimented a system of trust for the much-hyped little guy, where they could register their songs and allow them complete access to the system, but they choose not to. I have very little sympathy for them.
Indeed, copyright law -- especially before the stillborn monstrosity called the DMCA -- recognized that, in creation of a work, an author is vested with certain rights and the public is vested with certain rights. Copyright has traditionally been seen as a balancing act between the public's interest in open sharing of the work, and the public's interest in encouraging other authors to come forward and create.
As noted in Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman, it is only recently that the attitude has begun to shift toward investing "property" rights to the hands of copyright holders. Ironically, this means that almost all of the culture held up as a justification for the current system is actually a holdover from the earlier one.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
When they shut Napster down, you couldn't trade your recordings of Dave Matthews concerts unless the files were named undescriptively (read: uselessly). Many smaller artists were/are finding that their music is NO LONGER available for download over Napster. This is exposure they *depend* on.
Not all copyright holders are the RIAA. I've said this before and so have many others, but I will say it again. The RIAA represent themselves, and their own bottom line. They do not represent the artists. They think they represent all of music, when in reality they are crushing the "little guy" who is so important to musical innovation (eek, I actually used that word?!?) to preserve the status quo.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
BS. I am not "depriving" an artist of a profit if I copy something I would not have purchased at the market price. If I actually had to pay for Britney Spears and Eminem, I would have waited for the used bins to fill up so I could buy them at $4-$8 -- and bing! still no profits for the artist.
But I agree with the statement that Napster contributed to copyright infringement. Sharing Britney Spears and Eminem with people I don't know is not Fair Use. It is an attempt to get the goods at less than market price or for free. The question is still there, would Napster survive if it somehow was limited to legal file sharing? The answer is still pretty obvious: no. It required a mass of popular music to have sufficient users to be useful.
I am hosting two mp3s for your entertainment at www.ichimunki.com, just go there and type 'mp3' into the command line. I permit you and everyone to share these files as much as you will-- and I can do that. I created the songs and the files. However, there is not enough interest in work like mine to keep a Napster viable legally. And most work in which there is enough interest to get a Napster up and running is going to be work that the copyright holders do not want to share for free to the world.
But just because I am giving my files away for free online, does not mean I'd condone stealing the CD from a store. That results in the real loss of physical property. And if my bandwidth needs become excessive due to the files' popularity, I would-- of course-- have to charge for them to help cover the expense of hosting them. Internet services cost money to provide, and the people who do the work need to eat. This is the lesson we are learning in 2001.
I do not have a signature
For me (and a lot of others in the anti-spam community), Mr. Lessig lost all credibility when he wrote The Spam Wars. In it, he describes a group of vigilantes looking to change the nature of commerce on the net. What he fails to mention is that it's just a bunch of network admins using a self-compiled and maintained list to drop packets from open relays and known spammers from hitting their own networks.
/. issues, all the while decrying network operators dropping traffic they don't want on their network.
I find it both amusing and disturbing that he can be so strongly in favor of fair-use, reverse engineering, and against the DMCA, among other hot button
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
"which has never really struck me as being an integral part of innovation..."
Almost all technology in use today is in part available because of reverse engineering.
Without reverse engineering there would be no interoperability between Windows, Macs, Unix, etc.
Without reverse engineering we wouldn't even have the current PC at all.
Without reverse engineering we wouldn't have the huge microwave oven market we have today.
Car manufacturers buy each other's cars and completely take them apart to see how competitors do things.
There is simply no end to how much technology is improved through reverse engineering. Reverse engineering has ALWAYS been a huge part of innovation.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Out of the three cases mentioned, the one one that made me the most upset, and is still the one that makes my blood boil the most, was the DeCSS travesty.
I'm talking, particularly, about the case with 2600. I'm not a big backer of 2600 or Emmanuel but in this case I had to give the respect where it was deserved. This was the case, IMHO, that set the tone for all cases after it and because 2600.com made the hearing available on their site I, we, were given a first hand listen to just how badly lawyers could manipulate judges in technology cases.
After listening to this case, at least the whole of 2600 / Emmanuel's side, and finally finding out the judgement, I knew that it was only going to get worse was only going to get worse (I suggest doing a search here for 'Court' it's truly appalling). It wasn't as though the judgement and the judgement alone upset me. It wasn't that I was all "rah-rah" for 2600. It wasn't even that I thought DeCSS should be "legal." It's that the judge had no concept of technology and the justice system allowed a mac truck of a manipulative lawyer to run him over. Listen to the testimony.
I said it before and I will continue to say it, the judicial system needs better qualified people presiding in these cases. I say 'these' because, and IANAL but, this is an entirely different concept than, say, laws of the physical world and laws of the 'cyber one.' I've often thought and giggled about the idea that files are never stolen, because if you copy something it's still there. I truly feal that we need judges that know the facts of the technology before it's sppon fed to them by the attorney's on both sides.
Until that happens, and / or until the hearings on Dmitry, Napster, etc. are made public (if they have been could someone please link them) so we can know for sure if proper and fair judgements were passed.
Without that, and without the DMCA being either a) abolished, or b) re-written (I'd much prefer the latter) the companies that own the DMCA will continue to 0wn anyone they want.
That's my two cents. Mod it to hell.
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
Yes, there is a large amount of free and open material out there. However, this does not mean that Napster is either necessary or superior at delivering that material.
The point of free speech is that it is free. One cannot regulate free speech in all channels other than those necessary or superior to deliver it. This also used to be true of Copyright, at least before the Ninth Circuit hit with the Napster opinion.
Indeed, the Ninth Circuit came up with a similar standard to the one suggested above in the Sony Betmax case, and was amazingly completely dissed by the Supreme Court, which said that it isn't necessary that an instrumentality be either necessary or superior for fair uses to avoid contributory infringement for infringing uses, it sufficed that there COULD exist ANY substantial noninfringing use.
Now the Ninth Circuit, once more, protects Copyright holders with a test not very different from the Betamax case (ironically in a case where Sony is now a plaintiff). Perhaps the Supremes may reverse it someday, perhaps not. But don't pretend that the fact that there are other ways to distribute free subject matter doesn't mean that the public was not deprived of an important instrumentality for file-sharing.
More important, if there ever WAS another instrumentality that might be superior or necessary, the Ninth Circuit opinion assures that development of such technology would be chilled, lest those funding and using it be sued into oblivion by the big bad RIAA, right or wrong.
Fact is, Napster and DMCA have struck a blow to innovation, because they are permitting first entrants into a marketplace from competing with subsequent entrants, even where the instrumentality is not inherently infringing.
DMCA provides patent-like protection of unlimited term for unpatentable and unexamined inventions. Only the blessed unsued (read, licensed who pay the fees) can compete in that arena, and forever. First entrants win, for reasons entirely unrelated to any salutary intellectual property policies.
This is what we IP lawyers who don't work exclusively for such interests call, "a bad thing." Ultimately, its bad for those interests, but in any case, its bad for America.
At one time not too long ago, the information economy was just booming and CD sales were higher than ever. These interests went pleading to the Congress and the Courts claiming that they "needed" special protections to protect and enhance the economy.
Isn't it interesting that they got what they asked for, from both Courts and Congress, and almost immediately thereafter the information economy and record businesses tanked!
Kicking and screaming, the music and film industry has whined about EVERY new technology, from piano rolls to radio to television to audio tape to video tape to dat to streaming digital communications. Until recently, they lost every time and made much more money as a result. Now, they won and all they have done is to kill off a thriving and dynamic source of business.
Not discerning the difference between selling cocaine and smoking marajuana (most laws go by weight of item in posession.) is frightening.
Many drug users get high and dumb and rob, rape, fight and even kill. Most of the ones who get dumb are on a non-marajuana drug.
Voters get pissed when to many people are robbing raping, fighting and killing, so congress acting in self preservation is commited to the war on drugs. It doesn't seem to matter that these behaviors are no more common in pot smokers than in say alcohol drinkers. Do they care if a couple(of hundreds of thousands) pot smokers get locked up to? They don't seem to.
Marajuana is an introductory for drug dealers. They get started selling pot. see Dope wars for a tutorial. People say marjuana is an introductory drug for users, well that's because they meet dealers who can sell them other things. If pot was sold in Seven Elevens with 1/10 the THC at five times the price to people 21 or over, people would have no idea where to get crack, acid, or ecstecy. Steamroller action.
Now congresses revenue stream is being threatened by RIAA/MPAA. Now they must act in self preservation again. Do you think they diferentiate between a person who .mp3 of vital information to the chinese underground about the democracy movment?
*legally owns 2 copies of Genisis Invisible Touch and downloads the mp3s because it's saner than tring to burn them?
*a person who never contributes anything back to artist while downloading hundreds of songs?
*a person who distributes a
Why would they. Steamroller action is tolerated here.
Campain finance reform MUST go through so lack of support from the RIAA/MPAA is no longer a threat to these peoples careers. Congressmen in a panic seem to lose touch with the meaning of the word liberty.
This can get really ugly.
When they are done with us, any guesses who's next? What will they do when physical scarcity begins to end.
The way things are going, then next war will be fought over IP.
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
The problem with the computer industry is that that wasn't happening, so companies had to turn to the courts to force it to happen. As for the dot coms, I think that was Wall Street's way of saying, "party's over, nerds, now get to work". I just hope things don't end the way I think they will (no more individual innovation in the computer industry, death of open source from IP lawsuits, etc.).
On another note, I'm going to play devil's (lawyer's?) advocate and defend the DMCA (sort of):
Seeing as I haven't seen a realistic, workable alternative economic system for what we now call Intellectual Property, I figure we should probably stick with the current concept of IP, and try to patch it up so it can survive the "digital age" without being too broken or stupid.
Napster may have made it easy to trade copyrighted music files, but don't forget that it could just as easily be used for swapping free music and personal recordings.
The Internet can be used for wholesale piracy of music, videos, commercial software, you name it. Is the Internet being shut down? No, because it has many redeeming qualities.
I'm not trying to justify keeping Napster alive - I recognise that the number of people using it legally was somewhere between zero and zero - but nevertheless, I believe that shutting Napster down is not all that different to shutting down Hard Disk manufacturers because their media can be used for piracy.
Just my 0.02 Euro...
http://www.themeparks.ie
Silicon Valley has been technically boring the
past four years as people were rushing to bring
startups to IPO. Most people doing this were in
for the money, not the technology. And the tech
guys had worked 80 hour weeks developing boring,
me-too apps. Now there is time to be creative
again.
Never has the foundation been stronger-
2 GHZ, 1 GB computers for a grand, decent OS'es
with a maturing Linux and MS XP, decent development
language like Java and C#, and so on.
"Intellectual property is to property as fool's gold is to gold." -- multiple, anonymous, unattributable (and wonderful) internet quote
"The value of a thing is what the thing will bring." -- ancient maxim of law and economics.
When you create a piece of "intellectual" property, it can only be of any use to you if you share it with someone. It's fundamentally an idea. If you lock it in a box and keep someone from knowing about it, it will be silent and useless. Once you allow someone to read it, see it, or hear it, the idea escapes. It now is part of a conversation you have initiated with your audience. Copyright was originally granted by royal fiat, and later encoded in law, as a means of keeping printing presses in line. Around the 17th and 18th centuries, it became a legal protection for printers. When copies were limited and difficult to produce, it worked. The value of the copy could be expressed as partially the value of the intellectual effort of its creator, and partly the material investment of the publisher, printer, film studio, whoever. Now that copies are trivially easy to create digitally, this paradigm no longer applies, and people are trying to restrict copy rights based solely on the intellectual value of the property, and they're doing so by treating their customers as criminals, guilty until proven innocent, bunch of thieving bastards, all of them.
Release an album under a major label and watch as people download your material, without your permission, off of AudioGalaxy
I don't know if you've done this Vilk. I really don't care. When I was playing with up-and-coming bands in the late 1980's, I remember a hilarious scene with one of the many, dreary "battle of the bands" gigs I played. One of the acts in the seemingly endless lineup tried to get some sort of agreement or something that no one would attempt to steal "their" songs. It was funny because their music sucked, but it revealed generally how absurd and paranoid people have become about granting ideas the status of property. Anyone at the event could have "stolen" their songs. It was simply a matter of watching and listening, and about half the bands there had already demonstrated via their ability to play covers, that they could ape another's songs. The only way they could have avoided "song theft," to me, was to take the obvious precaution of not playing their material aloud.
Digital media has only excaberated this already precarious status. The cat is no longer in the bag, if ever it was. Songs and music were routinely copied back in the days of the cassette tape. It's just that the activity was not happening in an open, trackable public forum. What gives your "intellectual property" any value is that people are willing to pay for, not only the material, but the packaging and officialese that go along with a legitimized sale. If they aren't willing to do that, you won't ever have a career as an artist, or author, or otherwise.
I have yet to see any data showing how artists are starving on their feet because of napsterized "piracy." Being purely honest, I have to say that I have never, ever, not once in my life, logged on to or downloaded from Napster. I have on occasion been provided with some pirated mp3's by friends. I have retained only one of the cd's thus pirated, the Barenaked Ladies' debut "Gordon." And in all honesty I can say that I believe I've fairly compensated BNL for that CD, even though I have yet to buy a legit copy, because after hearing the songs on Gordon I went on to buy copies of "Born on a Pirate Ship," "Maroon," and "Stunt," all of which I have enjoyed immensely. I will, at some point in the future, make good on my however miniscule debt and buy a legitimate copy of "Gordon," if only because I want to see the packaging, and get back some of the loss from the mp3 compression. But I feel that if I had never been given a rip of "Gordon," I would probably have gone the rest of my life without putting $50 or so into the purchase of other BNL cd's. So whether or not it's paid for as a physical object, as an idea, it has paid for itself because the open circulation of a non-legitimate copy resulted in a willing fan who expended the effort and cash on other material from the group.
I know the intellectual-property hard-liners will have a problem with this kind of argument. To them a copy of a CD is as good as the original, and every copy represents money that the owners could make. However if I had been chased down by some sort of campus cop or "pirate hunter" and forced to relinquish my ripped mp3's of that CD, I probably would have gone on to avoid any further trouble from that area altogether.
There is a middle ground for all of this, I firmly believe, that allows artists and authors to be compensated for their efforts, as much as is possible. It will probably involve re-gaining the trust of audiences (do NOT call us consumers, please!), which could start with not chasing down kids in college dorms, confiscating people's equipment, slapping them with lawsuits, etcetera. Not that I expect that to happen.
But fundamentally, the rules have changed. There's a great song by the Presidents of the USA that I think is about this kind of thing. It's on their latest CD and it's called Blank Baby. "You might see somone taking pictures. You can't put them back and I'll tell you why . . ." And later on "You might see a painting in a studio / might test the paint to see if it is wet / might start scraping down as far as you can go / till the canvas is as blank as it can get / even though the paint is dry / you can just erase it all by rolling back your eyes." Art exists between an artist and an audience. It is a dialogue. You have to give your end of the dialogue to your audience, or you're not going to be able to carry on the conversation. If you restrict that conversation, it ends because the audience can always find other people to talk to. They will be for the most part unwilling to give up their rights just to accomodate your profit motive, which is where we're headed with draconian copyright laws and the DMCA. A law which is absurd and trivially easy to violate is a law which is not respected, and when the law is not respected, it doesn't mean much anymore. If the law makes innocuous harmless activity criminal, as we have obviously seen with Napster, a large segment of the population has no problem being innocuous, harmless criminals. Certainly they've been primed for this role with invasive and idiotic drug laws. Laws keep honest people honest, and when they make criminals out of formerly honest people, they and their makers lose their credibility.
It may be that it is not practical to make money as an artist in the digital era. It may be that you have to go back to making money off of live performance, or find yourself a patron. It does not seem "natural" or inevitable that society will bend itself to accomodate that profit motive.
The horse and buggy companies, before they all but vanished in the early part of the 1900's, were able to get all kinds of aggressive and draconian laws applied to automobile drivers, requiring (as I recall) what probably timed out as a 10-minute ritual on the part of an automobile driver at a stop sign, of standing, jumping around, waving, honking, firing a pistol, and the like. No small part of that was probably on behalf of horse-and-buggy proprietors to make the use of automobiles less convenient, and so they probably hoped, kill what was certainly a stupid fad before it got out of control. But for all the protestations, all the fiddling, the technology was there, it was in demand, and they were unable to stop it.
Digital music isn't quite an apples-and-oranges comparison, but it similarily makes trivially easy what was monstrously difficult before, and threatens to put a lot of people out of work. I don't know where it's written in the Constitution that anyone has a natural inalienable right to a job, nor to a guaranteed protection of their "revenue stream." Certainly music and art existed long before profit could be made thereby, and the fundamental urge to create is not driven by profit, but by need. Songwriters write songs because they need to, first, before they discover they can make money at it. I can easily see, if heavens forfend, the RIAA and all their members go out of business, that culture will somehow survive. Whether individual artists survive depends on how smart they are, and how willing to accomodate to a new reality they are. Browbeating their audience, I predict, will be a career-limiting move. You can see how much credibility Metallica pissed away with their Napster suit (please remember, Metallica gained their original legion of fans through the open trading of their bootlegged demos). Accomodating them, respecting them, treating them as participants in your conversation -- that will be a winning strategy.
If the DMCA and other absurd extensions to copyright laws aren't struck down, I suspect the general level of civil disobedience will rise, and the credibility of our lawmaking and corporate institutions will take another major hit. How low can they go?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on