Journal prestidigital's Journal: IPR
Woe to you lawyers! for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering Luke 11:52
Perhaps deliberate, this is a most timely quote. (During the war in Iraq, all the quotes were, of course, about the coming of the end.)
For those whose personal information net is rigged for catching anything in the realm of music, technology, consumer rights, open vs. closed source or any or all of the above, this is a VERY hot topic.
Knowledge, creativity, and information are under seige - from pirates who would steal knowledge for their own gain, from those who insist that a great injustice is taking place everytime someone doesn't have to pay for access to knowledge and information, and from those who would seek to control knowledge and information (be they corporations or unjust governments).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not going to say that everything should be "free and open." I'm favor of some freeness and openess, but I also believe in the power of money. While it is (by far) not my guiding belief, on some important level money matters. You can argue that it shouldn't, but it still does. The world would a terrible and boring place if no one ever produced another newspaper, book, or magazine because pirates bled the money out of those endeavors. You can argue that the world would be a more beautiful place without all the mass media, mass-hype, over-digitization, etc. But nothing short of a complete do-over of humanity is going to stop the propogation of knowledge, creativity, and information (in all it's many good and bad flavors). And Progress sure as hell is not going to stop, or even slow down, just because downloading is easy.
With respect to music and purchasing a single copyright:
I will pay for only what I want and I will only pay for it once. The music industry will have it when I can download any particular song I like for about $0.50 or $1.00 (USD). Apple is already getting it - if you own a Mac. In the digital age, I should not have to physically drive to a store to purchase an entire album (and all its slick merchandising overhead). Neither should I have to pay for a commercial-free subscription just to have more choices than commercial radio (e.g. XM Radio - which is paying over and over to hear the same songs over and over and on someone else's schedule to boot).
Instead, I should be able to pick and choose songs I like for purchase. I should be able to save them to a digital medium. I should be able to transfer them between multiple digital media (my PC, my portable player, my car stereo, my PDA/phone).
RIAA should not be worried about me and my buddies swapping individual songs here and there. We are just turning each other on to new sounds, and I have to believe that is better overall for the sale of music (unfortunately, music isn't the only thing they want you to buy). RIAA should be worried about buddies who buy a single copy of an album and then burn it for 10 friends. But I think the pay-per-song model would mostly put a halt to that. I think a lot of people will just be out there sampling and downloading what they want and can afford and so what if they are passing it around. I'll download 10 songs that I like and my buddy will download 10 he likes and we might share 2 or 3 each, but in the end the record companies will still get $20 bucks for 20 songs...multiplied by hundreds of millions of buddies. More importantly, RIAA should be worried about that pirate operation in the Maui-Waui Islands pumping out bootlegs for less than half the market price. Ferfucksake, leave the consumers alone and just start giving them what they want.
I realize things take time and money...lawsuits, for instance. If RIAA were spending half as much time and effort on overcoming the hurdles that stand in the way of actually giving consumers what they want for a fair price, instead of dictating what people should hear and how and when they should hear it, then we'd be happy and they'd (still) be rich.
I think copyright protection is important, but for a much different reason than RIAA: giving credit where credit is due. When people share digital media with one another, they should not be able to modify it in any way w/o consent of the owner - this should include filename and other directory attributes. One not-so-clever way folks have of countering attempts to stop songs-swapping is to simply change directory attributes so files comes up as something else. I often find music on the net with an incorrect title or, worse, an incorrect performer.
Lyrics sites that have advertisements should have to pay song writers for posting their songs. Other than that, the only rule should be that you cannot post a song without crediting the author. Crediting the wrong author is also a bad thing. Perhaps inadvertently, this is a common occurrence when a popular band covers a song by another performer. 99.99% of the time it is not the case that one party is attempting to plagiarize the song of another. Everything else is just free advertising.
So, what does this ramble about the pitfalls of pop culture have to do with the assault on knowledge? Exactly this: All the hysteria that surrounds this incessant need to protect profitrights is spilling over into academia and encroaching upon our freedom to communicate knowledge with one another without fear of repercussions. It's bad enough we already have to justify our resistance to the closing of networks and the classification of knowledge in the name of "security."
Somewhere at the bottom of this is the question of survival by competition versus survival by cooperation?
