Slashdot Mirror
UK Anti-Piracy Law Survives Court Challenge
Grumbleduke writes "The UK's controversial Digital Economy Act survived its second court challenge today. Two ISPs had appealed last year's ruling that the measures included did not breach EU law and, for the most part, the Court of Appeal agreed, ruling in favor of the Government and the 10 unions and industry groups supporting the law in court. The decision was welcomed by the industry groups, but criticized by the UK's Pirate Party, whose leader pointed to the lack of evidence that the law would have any positive effects. A UK copyright specialist noted that the ISPs may still appeal the decision to the UK's Supreme Court, seeking a reference to the Courts of Justice of the European Union, and wondered if the law could now attract the same attention from the Internet as SOPA and ACTA. The law is still some way from being implemented, and the first notifications are not expected to be sent to alleged file-sharers before 2013, and the next steps could also be open to a legal challenge."
But if someone's reason for downloading rather than buying is because the musician isn't getting paid enough, then it seems to me like they should give money directly to the musician to compensate.
This is still based on the flawed notion that downloading is something for which the musician needs to be 'compensated'. It isn't. Downloading does not take anything from the musician or harm them in any way. If the musician doesn't know I downloaded the song, the world appears to them exactly the same as it would appear if I didn't download the song. I do not owe the musician money for making an action that has no effect on them.
There is something the musician needs to be compensated for, and that is their own labor as offered on a free market. Composing or playing a song is where the labor is involved, and so it makes economic sense to pay them for that. Their labor is not involved in someone else making and storing a copy of the data after that data already exists. Paying them for that makes no economic sense. The musician creates extra value with their labor when they compose or play the song, but no extra value when the song is downloaded. That extra value is created entirely by the labor of the downloader and those providing the various network services used to download the song. Moreover, the fact that this second quantity of labor is very small is incidental; it is merely an advantage of technology, and cannot magically cause the musician to have created value that the musician did not in fact create.
Consider the analogy of a plumber. We pay the plumber to fix the kitchen sink, but we don't pay him every time we run water out of the tap, because his labor isn't involved there, and running the water has no effect on him. The plumber's labor creates value by fixing the sink, but not by running the water. Even though the amount of labor required to turn on the tap is very small, this is merely an advantage of technology and cannot magically create any new debt towards the plumber. We recognize it is economically and morally ridiculous that the plumber should demand payment every time we run water from the tap, that he should set his price for running the water, and that the government should enforce his demands.
It is equally ridiculous when this is applied to data instead of tap water, but for whatever reason, we (in general) don't recognize that yet. We are convinced that an MP3 file has a magical connection to a musician that can somehow create new debt towards the musician without the musician doing any additional work or even otherwise being aware that anyone is copying the file.
Note that the common argument that 'downloading the song for free affects the musician by erasing an opportunity for them to sell it' is invalid, because it presupposes the opportunity to sell, a concept itself based on the debt created by copying the song, which morally speaking is fictional debt. It is like saying that 'running the water without paying the plumber removes an opportunity for the plumber to sell it'. Water is not the thing the plumber had the right to demand payment for in the first place, and likewise, copiable information is not the thing the musician had the right to demand payment for in the first place.