April 4th, 2008
Invincible ignorance and the Pirates Bay
Some people are truly exasperating in the depths to which they will go to justify what is clearly wrong. To add insult to injury, their activities undermines the cause of real reformers who might help build a copyright system less tilted against consumers which recognizes that intellectual property is different, and should have reasonable limits on the length of time of its protections.
I’m speaking, of course, of Sweden-based Pirates Bay, an organization that is downright gleeful in its efforts to assist downloaders of copyrighted content. Most recently, they have told the record companies to “go screw themselves” in response to a request for damages lodged with a Stockholm District Court. Previously, they have described attempts by the Swedish government to co-opt ISPs in its fight against illegal downloaders as being a “declaration of war on an entire generation of young voters.” They even managed to inject a bit of pointless nationalism into the debate by declaring it “shameful” to go after young people “on behalf of the American movie and music industries” (if they want, I’m willing to claim ABBA and The Hives as American).
This reflects a general spirit of entitlement to other people’s work which they appear to justify because modern tools have made it relatively easy to digitize and copy them. Rickard Falkvinge, a member of the Pirate Party in Sweden (so named because, apparently, because Pirates are cool, and not because pirates ever stole anything…yes, that is sarcasm) insists that file “sharing” should be treated as a “techno-historical fact,” something I doubt he would be so enthusiastic about if the object to be shared was his car and apartment. The argument seems to presume that whatever is technically possible is therefore legal. Because I know how to pick locks, I am legally allowed to enter my neighbors apartment and forcefully share her large-screen TV set by moving it into my home.
Entitlement seems at the heart of the issue. Student Bay hopes to do for school books what Pirates Bay is doing for movies and music. In a press release (related here, and found by way of Ars Technica), the site administrators defended their actions:
In Sweden it is claimed that education is free. Despite this students are forced every term to spend thousands of kronor on books necessary for their education. It is totally unreasonable.
What’s even more unreasonable is to expect that people will still write those textbooks if people aren’t paying for them. Perhaps in the future more and more content in the form of “free text books” a la Wikipedia will be found on the Internet. Here’s an idea: why not work on developing such free books, much as Linus Torvalds has worked so hard to make a free version of a desktop operating system named Linux, and use THAT? That seems more fair and ethical, at least if the practitioners have any semblance of respect for the notion of intellectual property.
The fact is, however, that they don’t…assuming they even bother to think in any serious fashion about the system they so cavalierly tilt against in their selfish desire to get the hard work of other people for free.
Intellectual property is important in the same way as physical property is important. Both are artificial constructs defended by government rules, and only exist because such constructs are useful as a means by which to inspire creativity and effective use of resources.
In a nanotech future, expect more and more of the real value of products in a global economy to be intellectual. If a chair or table or computer or car is less important than the schema that can be fed into nanotech assemblers to produce perfect clones, then the only way to maintain the incentives principle which undergirds modern capitalism and makes it possible for well-off kids in Sweden to afford computers through which they can download illegal copyrighted content is through intellectual property.
Discussion of this issue has been hijacked by the digital equivalent of vandals breaking windows in main street stores. They really add nothing to the discussion beyond a vague sense of righteousness.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 04/04/08
