I read once that Thomas Jefferson opposed the very notion of copyright. Despite that, the United States established its first copyright law shortly after its founding. At the time, the original creator of a work held the exclusive rights to that work for five years. Thereafter it entered the public domain. In the centuries since, the situation has gone horribly wrong.
It's impossible to argue that it's "legal" to copy and widely distribute someone else's creative work, their intellectual property. Once outside the bounds of Fair Use, we're talking theft, pure and simple. I create a product for sale and you copy it and distribute it over and over for free. You thus deprive me of the income I would rightfully expect from sales. How is that not theft?
Intellectual property theft and distribution, piracy for short, is nothing new. The great change is in form and content. Someone could always photocopy the latest best-selling novel, but the copy was inevitably inferior to the original. People started pirating commercial video-tapes of movies almost at the same instant they went on sale, but the copy was always inferior to the original.
This is no longer the case. With a home computer and some free software you can make a perfect copy of a DVD; music CD's are even easier. Both procedures allow you to compress your copy if you're not fanatical about quality, if "good enough" is good enough.
Then there's the distribution network. Piracy of old required a hands-on transaction. "I know a friend who knows a guy who is related to this fellow who can get you a tape of [name of new movie]." Today, you Google a title and watch the hits roll in. Fire up your bit-torrent client and in short order you have your copy.
Of course, people are watching what you do. Last year I missed the final four episodes of House. I didn't want to wait for the DVD set, so I Googled, I bit-torrented, and in short order I had a good enough copy of each on my computer. A day later I got an email from Comcast saying that the company holding the copyright to House noted this activity and was notifying them in accordance with the DMCA. No threats, no actions, just a simple warning. I've since bought the set.
Which is not to say that I'm a saint. I loved the old, thieving Napster because I was amazed at what I could find on their peer-to-peer network. Nothing available today matches it. I once did a search for Dimitri Tiomkin's score for The Thing From Another World, a soundtrack I had been seeking -- unsuccessfully -- for years. Voila, there it was. Where the hell did that guy get it from? I have no idea, but the quality was "good enough" and I enjoyed the hell out of it. (Until the hard drive crashed and I lost it all, but that's another story.) Do the same today on existing file-sharing networks and odds are you'll find zip, despite the soundtrack finally being available on CD (which I eagerly bought).
And so here's the situation we find ourselves in. Copyright law means that all those people distributing all those movies and songs via their computers, on all those varied and sundry peer-to-peer, file-sharing networks, are thieves. At the same time, modern technology makes it impossible to stop this from happening. This is a recurring theme. Someone develops a way to stop software, music, or video copying, and an hour or so later someone has cracked it. The apparent lack of effort needed to crack the protection makes the cost of creating the protection unreasonable.
Which is why the music and movie industries champion draconian responses. They both proceed from the premise that we, the people they want to sell their product to, are indeed thieves. Therefore, we all must pay. And pay. And pay some more. In their universe, your computer would police your usage of it. Every component would be on guard for copyright infringement. If you strayed, your computer would cease to function. What they desire is incredibly intrusive, and the punishments they wish to mete out are ridiculous.
Recently, a woman was found guilty of piracy and ordered to pay the music industry a fine of $220,000. Her offense? She had a Kazaa file-sharing account and her shared folder held 22 songs. Mind you, she didn't make a dime off having those songs in that folder. The fine was based on a theoretical calculation of what it might have cost the industry in terms of potential sales. This being the same industry that once calculated that college students account for over 40% of all piracy and has now said "oops", reducing that figure to 15%.
None of this is new or even newsworthy. It's just that the entire situation is more and more untenable. I think copyright law has gotten out of control. The industry's destruction of Napster helped create today's more numerous, stealthier alternatives. It is easier than ever to just steal the song or movie you want. As a result, more and more of us affirm the industry's suspicion, that we are all pirates.
The software industry responded to software piracy by removing copy protection. They claimed to lose billions as a result of piracy, yet the industry flourished. They focused their enforcement on operations that cranked out copy after copy for profit rather than on individuals who might have an illegal copy installed.
The music and movie industries could do something similar. It's not the consumer's fault that both industries are built on irrational business models. And while it's not up to me to tell them what is a reasonable price for their product, if piracy is growing at the rate they claim then it is self-evident that the price they want is more than the market is willing to bear. Maybe it's time for a change.
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