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Q & A With Canada's Michael Geist
Torrentz writes "P2PNet is running a question and answer session with Canada's Michael Geist, a leading Internet and copyright expert. Geist discusses P2P, the music business, and the future direction of
copyright law." From the interview: "My focus has traditionally been on Internet issues and I'm very active on privacy, spam, Internet governance issues. The growing attention to copyright merely reflects its critical importance to the Internet and to creativity and culture more generally."
Nobody says he has better opinions than you. But being a law professor and with his CV, he probably does have special knowledge, and he apparently performs quite skillfully. So his opinions might not be better, but his facts are likely to be a lot better, and he probably knows a lot more about the entire legal aspect than you (and most people) do.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I don't think there are many people who consider it a crime for me to loan a friend a CD (or a book or a DVD for that matter). If we could extend that model somehow to P2P, keeping it easy to share with people we have "direct contact" with, but more difficult to share with people on another continent, I think that would be a more balanced approach.
But if it's OK to lend a CD or a book to a friend who lives in the same city as you, surely it's OK to lend one to a friend who lives further away?
It doesn't even have to cross continents - if I live in London and you live in Edinburgh and we only physically meet a couple of times in a decade, then it's going to be very inconvenient for us to meet specially to set up a sharing link. And as soon as you allow any form of remoting (even sending a physical token by post), you open things up again for people sharing with people on a different continent who they don't know in the slightest and couldn't even describe as a passing acquaintance, let alone a friend..
And how do you stop people passing things on to all their friends, and so on? Six degrees of separation, and all that: however you set the system up, someone would come up with a filesharing program that would work with it. It might be slower than current systems, with a lot more steps required to transfer a file between continents. But it'll work.
OK, I can name at least one thing wrong with that statement. (Hint: there's no Canadian association of anything American).