Journal Dirtside's Journal: Copying is not theft -- they are separate bodies of law 1
The MPAA Lectures on Copyright Law
The Motion Picture Association of America, joined by other entertainment industry groups, has sent a letter to more than 2,000 university presidents enlisting their help in stopping the use of high-speed campus networks to download movies, records and games from the Internet. "We believe there must be a substantial effort, both disciplined and continuous, to bring this piracy under control," the letter said. The trade groups compared the practice with "walking into the campus bookstore and in a clandestine manner walking out with a textbook without paying for it."
The funniest part is that they sent this to "more than 2,000 university presidents," people who are, generally, smart enough to understand that stealing a physical object like a textbook is distinctly different from duplicating bits of data without permission. Either this is part of some (theoretically) more clever ploy, or they're complete idiots.
I post this every so often, and I'm going to keep posting it until everyone understands. It's very simple. If you have a book, and I take the book, you no longer have the book. If you have a book, and I copy the book, you still have the book, and I have it, too. The same goes for music, movies, or anything that can be compactly represented with digital information.
Yet organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA want us to believe that copying is identical in every way to theft. I think this is going to hurt them in the long run, since most people are smart enough to understand, once the distinction is made clear, that there is a critical difference.
None of this is to say that there's anything wrong with the principle behind copyright (and other forms of information control law, like patent and trademark). The principle is that granting a temporary monopoly on the distribution of created works (like books, movies, music, etc.) will encourage citizens to create more, since they are guaranteed (by law, at least) to be able to profit from their efforts. The fact that the monopoly is temporary is critical; copyright is a give-and-take between the goverment (i.e. the people) and individual creators. The people give a temporary monopoly to the creators, and in exchange, at the end of that period, the copyrighted work is taken by the public domain. In theory, the fact that any individual can trivially make copies of a copyrighted work is irrelevant, because doing so is illegal -- the copyright holder maintains the legal right to control the distribution of the work.
The emergence of certain technologies has, de facto, obsoleted this theory. It is trivial for just about anyone to copy just about any information (such as the contents of a book, CD, movie, etc.) and distribute it at will for very little perceived or real cost. There are far too many people doing this for a content creator to sue, or the government to prosecute, more than a tiny fraction of them. Now one might think of two obvious responses to this situation:
1) Since the hardware that allows this copying is made by a relatively few entities (large hardware companies), it is possible and feasible to pass laws that restrict general-purpose computing hardware, so that they cannot copy copyrighted content without the content creators' permission. However, as a technical matter, this is totally infeasible; end-users will still find ways around it, even if the hardware creators conform strictly to the letter of such laws. Edwards' Law tells us, "You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem."
Furthermore, laws like this will end up crippling the computing industry, which has revenues somewhere north of ten times that of the entertainment industry. We should destroy one industry to protect the business model of another industry that's one-tenth the size?
2) The entire copyright paradigm should be changed to deal with individuals' abilities to copy content at will. The problem here is that people are willing to copy and distribute content that they have no legal right to; this is not a technological problem, but a social one. Something new will have to replace copyright, because the technology that has made it obsolete is not going away.
There are a lot of suggestions out there, but I'm not very familiar with them yet. The truth is, we have no experience with the large-scale deployment of other methods, and the only way to really tell what will happen will be to try them out.
Hey! Free lunch! (Score:2)
While I of course agree, don't forget that the content and tech industries are somewhat symbiotic even if not exactly equal in size; much of tech relies on content being produced and vice versa. When you hurt one, it hurts the other.
Something new will have to replace copyright, because the technology that has made it obsolete is not going away.
I know most people think nanotechnology is science fiction that is centuries away (hardly)... but just like the 'internet changes everything', so will 'nanotechnology REALLY change everything'. When no one ever has to worry about survival needs again (they can copy their food almost as cheaply and easily as bits of info), there really isn't much of a JUSTIFICATION for copyright, other than the moral right of attribution (to get your ego stroked).
In the meantime (5 to 15 years), yeah, it'll be rough, but there's still other options like open source, gift economies, street performer protocols, micropayments, donations, taxes, etc.
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