I just saw this story on TorrentFreak, about how the FBI busted the EliteTorrents.org tracker site. Inevitably, a few commenters tried yet again to push the tired notion that everyone reading the page should feel guilty for “stealing” all that content. To which I would make the following final and irrefutable reply:
Considering how much bleating the media moguls (and their lapdogs) do about The Law, it’s amazing how eagerly they support one specific legal fallacy – conflating two very different types of crimes. But the law itself has always been perfectly clear: “theft” and “copyright infringement” are NOT the same thing. That was true long before digital sharing, and it remains true even today, under ludicrous new legislation like the DMCA.
I’m no lawyer, but I’d venture to guess that this emphatic legal distinction exists precisely in order to acknowledge the obvious reality: that taking a unique physical object away from someone is quite different from making one more copy of something that’s infinitely copyable. And further, that while stealing physical goods may be considered immoral, depriving someone (or some corporate entity) of revenue is essentially just a contract dispute.
Once you recognize that truth, it’s difficult to avoid a further blinding insight: that while today’s laws against theft remain quite reasonable, laws governing copyright have been warped insanely out of shape by vastly wealthy corporate interests – and hence amply deserve to be ignored.
So much for legal theory. On the purely practical side, it seems pretty stupid to ignore the reality that sharing is never going to stop, even if you put half the country in jail for it – or totally lock down the Internet to the point where it becomes useless for any purpose but propaganda and advertising (like TV). So you might as well bow to the tide of history and make sharing part of the business model sooner instead of later.
Bottom line, no one should ever feel guilty for breaking an illogical, immoral and unenforceable law. And certainly not for a crime they didn’t actually commit.
August 11, 2008 at 8:58 am
I think there’s a case to be made that something is being stolen, but to make the case honestly sort of makes the content owners look bad.
In many cases, what is being stolen is an artificial scarcity. We have the infrastructure to saturate everyone’s every free moment with content, and enough new content produced that you would can see the same thing twice. That’s good (I guess) for us but a problem for content owners. Each article of content is a small fish in a very big ocean.
When someone uploads Crappy Summer Blockbuster 2005 to 20 people, that’s 20 people who are not going to rent Crappy Summer Blockbuster 2007 tonight. Once the latest vapid pop hit gets copied to all the iPods in school, the kids don’t have to listen to TV and radio (and advertising and whatever other vapid hits are being manufactured into a commercial property) to get it anymore.
The problem is, content is not the product. Pop music stars don’t create music. They create an advertising audience. TV studios don’t produce sitcoms. They produce eyeballs to sell to advertisers. I honestly have no idea what to call the stuff Hollywood is producing, but I don’t think it’s good for us.
We are indeed stealing their product, the artificial scarcity that they scheme so diligently to create. The dialog becomes very confusing because they don’t want to admit that is their product, and instead insist it is about the content. But nothing makes sense in that context. You can’t steal bits.
August 15, 2008 at 12:17 pm
While I don’t disagree with anything you say, my original point was mainly about the terminology. If content moguls are going to insist on the letter of the law, they should stop putting ads on my DVDs bleating about people “stealing” movies. Intellectual property is NOT ownership, and copying it is not “stealing.” Never has been; still isn’t even under idiotic laws like the DMCA or C-61.
Further to your point, while copying MAY indeed deprive a copyright holder of revenue, that revenue is NOT “stolen.” The content industry is cheating at semantics, and we need to call them on it.