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Pew Study: File Traders Don't Care About Copyright
An anonymous reader writes "A recent poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project focused on that portion of the file trading community that is over 18. The major finding is that two-thirds of all file traders in this age bracket are not concerned about violating copyright laws. This remained consistant even when they split up the respondents by sex, income, and race."
But will it mean they're done politically? They've bought an awful lot of politicians in Washington, no matter what our honored lobbiest guest said here a couple days ago. (If Bill Clinton and other top pols show up to a going-away party for Hilary "Wicked Witch of the East" Rosen, I would say they have bought influence.)
My question is, the media like to talk about how the average person doesn't know what file sharing is and what the issues at stake are, but if there are 60 million people doing it then how can that possibly be true? If one fifth of the population of your country does anything on a regular basis, then how can you seriously claim that they don't understand what that activity is? It seems like so many other ridiculous claims ginned up by journalists like that disgraced NYTimes reporter, and repeated unthinkingly by the rest of the news crowd.
OK, so if that's bunk, and those 60 million people do understand what is at stake with file-sharing, then why aren't they making themselves heard in the government? Why isn't that anger translating politically? My theory is there is no membership organization they can focus their voice through. If we had something like the AARP or NRA for online freedoms, my bet is you'd start seeing politicians learning to dance to our tune in an awful hurry. (and no, the EFF is not that organization. they do great work, but a membership organization they are not).
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
It would have been a better study if they had delved more into the reasons why most people don't care.
For example, do people not care because they don't even think about it, because they think they won't get caught, or because they think a monopoly is abusing both copyright law and the campaign finance system? Some of the above ? None of the above ?
My only reaction to the study in its current form is like "well duh-uh !!!".
Hey, I am one of those people. I've got about 40 gigs of movies and documentaries shared on K-lite. All of them are public domain and downloadable from the Moving Pictures Database on Archive.org. During the past three months, none of them have been downloaded even once.
:)
In other news, I had an mp3, named after a particular Metallica song, of my voice saying to not buy, purchase or download anything Metallica related. I'd rather just see those meatheads not sell another album or concert ticket. Now, that's been downloaded hundreds of times.
It's no real mystery what people do with P2P applications.
And while there has been a remarkable "revolution" in the arts which has created some "in the gut" recognition for something called "intellectual property," the human animal simply has a terrible time recognizing that music, or performance, or writing, or any idea made slightly tangible, is not just something you share.
They're like the air on a hot summer day. We swim in an ocean of ideas - our own indistinguishable from those around us. We inhale and osmose and exclaim and excrete all as natural instinctive intellectual processes. We are not built to recognize such artificial distinctions as "the owner of a song" (or a sentence, or an idea) because they are simply unnatural. This ownership must be violated at every instant - as you sing in the shower, as you share a rumor, as a teacher teaches or a librarian lends you our richest treasures. Calling it "intellectual property" is itself propaganda - it is the most shocking of bad metaphors in recent times.
Copyright is the barest of fictions, intended to allow artists to live, not Michael Eisner to summer in Tenerife. It does make for some interesting, even good, results, in the way they were originally practiced (as intended by the folks who founded our nation, for instance) - where for a few (like seven!) years there were some artifical means for an artist to thrive from her work, that didn't involve the help of wealthy patrons (which was how the old world used to do it).
But I think if you asked Washington he would be very surprised at the idea of copyright taken precedence over sharing - though of course he and his colleagues would have shaken their heads at the complexity of "mass-scale distributed sharing."
They would certainly rage at and mock the outrageous "extend every time mickey mouse is in danger" new time limits (one of the more transpareant examples of the subversion of democracy by a wealthy cartel). And if informed of the new punishments for violators, or pre-punishment of potential violators, or direct trust "taxes" on things which might be used to violate... they would pick up their arms and fight.
You think it's melodramatic to say so, but America is a nation of ideas, of rational supremacy, and the economic achievement that can only come from intellectual liberty. The new rules that Disney and Microsoft have mutated intellectual property with over the last decade choke off that liberty in the most violent way, by destroying the commons of ideas, erasing the essential quality of trust in our democracy, and violating the supremacy of free speech and free expression that made our country wealthy, successful in affairs of state, and also a fun place to live.
And all this, not for some grave end - to fight terrorism or feed the hungry - but only so a publisher can increase their profit margins.
Not even the politicians would countenance it, ordinarily. It's bad for almost everyone but a select few, and it is even bad for them - content creators need the commons more than anyone. But politicians have a unique respect for those who control the media...
Remember what copyright was originally intended to do. Consider the new tools we have - there are better ways now than what we did in the past, and anything is better than what the cartel wants.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Copyright is largely an artificial construct, unlike theft (which certain people like to erroneously and politically link it to.) It's never really existed in any significant portion of our evolution, so (I'd say) it's not really considered a real thing: it's an artificially imposed prohibition.
If the same principle was applied to food, or furniture, with everyone having their own little Star Trek replicators, people wouldn't respect it then, either.
Maybe it means: since everyone has their own printing-press, making a significant living from the prohibition of duplication of a work, is nolonger feasible or realistic? Like any number of other professions (starving (visual) artists languishing in obscurity and poverty, anyone?)
I don't think it's so much about price (though it's always a factor) as people's psychology: copyright doesn't really make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copyable; where the means of production and dissemination is in the hands of everyone.
Is that noise I hear the fingernails of the copyright cartels screeching down the cliff-face of a paradigm shift?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow if you could just get the votes in Congress required to pass a bill to repeal it. Sure, Dubya might veto it, but if you can get a two thirds majority in Congress, you can override a veto.
If you don't think this can happen, consider that more Americans are trading files today than voted for George Bush. Yes, many if not most file traders are under eighteen, but political upheavals usually take time. The sort of time that would allow most of today's youthful peer-to-peer users to come of age.
My new piece Change the Law explains this in more detail. It recommends several specific steps you can take to repeal copyright. The recommendations I give are:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
If you're under eighteen, you can do all of those things but vote. And your right to vote will come in time. The RIAA is not going to go away.Finally, Should Copyright Even Exist? considers the question of whether the ability of computers to make faithful copies of digital data without significant cost so outweighs any benefit that copyright may have to society, that we would be better off if copyright were eliminated entirely.
Request your free CD of my piano music.