Originally written 26 August, 2002
So I linked to a number of articles today about the current battles over intellectual property. I create copyrighted IP every day, so it's something I've thought about a few times. Some of the work I create is here, available for you all to read. A good amount is done as contract programming work that you can only see in compiled form if you buy one of the applications I work on.
So what's the big to-do about? Congress, at the urging of major media companies and groups representing them, has been passing some pretty bad laws. These laws have extended copyright repeatedly in order to keep Mickey Mouse exclusively a Disney property, have made it illegal to talk in any meaningful way about ways to break copy protection, and are proposing to allow third parties to disrupt networks or private computers because they might have copyrighted material on them.
Well, I think that copyright infringement shouldn't be legal. If I create something, I like to have it protected. I put a copyright statement up on Dave's Picks after almost five years just because a school district in CA was infringing my copyright. They'd taken a page I'd created, and copied it onto a server of their own. And most importantly to me, they didn't link back to the original, so people who read it wouldn't know who'd done the work to put the information together, and would have no way of finding updated or corrected information.
The current music industry desire for punishment far outweighs the seriousness of the crime of copying music. There are already laws in place making copying illegal. Are the existing laws easy to enforce? No. But that actually serves as something of a buffer. If someone copies a page from a book and gives it to a friend, that's copyright infringement, and is illegal. Is it worth prosecuting? Probably not. If you make a mix-tape of songs for a friend, that's illegal, too. It's also probably not worth prosecuting. And in those sorts of cases, the copyright holder probably won't even object. I wouldn't. You can even argue that making a mix tape helps sell more music, because the person you give it to might want to go out and buy the whole album after hearing a song.
The latest law being proposed is the equivalent of allowing a copyright holder to kick in your front door and rummage through all your things because they think you might have a Xerox squirreled away somewhere in your house.
Personally, I have a ton of MP3s on my computer. They're all ripped from CDs I bought and still own. Are they illegal? I'm not sure. Are they immoral? I don't think so. I don't download music from the net unless it's been made available by the artist. But I do pull the CDs I own into my computer. It's a much more convenient way for me to listen to music that I've already bought and paid for (in many cases, two or three times).
Part of the problem is that the current distribution methods suck. It's gotten better with the 'net, since I can order a CD that's out of print in the US from somewhere else and get a copy of music I want to hear. Or I can order a book from amazon.co.uk that is only available in a different (and sometimes inferior) version here in the us. But there's a ton of music out there that I'd like to hear, that I can't legally buy right now because it's out of print (or never was in print on CD). In some cases, I've digitized an LP. In other cases, I have an old cassette tape that I'll listen to in the car once in a while. But if that music were available for me to buy today, in some decent form, I'd pay for much of it again, for the convenience of being able to have it on my computer without having to spend 3-4 hours digitizing an LP.
Fix the distribution problem, and you'll go a long way to fixing the reason for my IP violations. Make it possible for me to get a copy of an out of print CD without having to infringe someone's copyright. Buf if you enact a law that allows the major labels to attack my computer because I've digitized The Beat Farmers' Tales of the New West for my own use, you've turned me into an enemy, rather than trying to get me to help with the problem.