The latest eye-rolling news item — about a company representing Hollywood studios demanding royalites of 3 Euro plus VAT each from Irish pre-school children for watching DVDs — reminded me to finally get around to mentioning Larry Lessig’s article in the Wall Street Journal, In Defense of Piracy.
This war must end. It is time we recognize that we can’t kill this creativity. We can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using these tools to create, or make them passive. We can only drive it underground, or make them “pirates.” And the question we as a society must focus on is whether this is any good. Our kids live in an age of prohibition, where more and more of what seems to them to be ordinary behavior is against the law. They recognize it as against the law. They see themselves as “criminals.” They begin to get used to the idea.
That recognition is corrosive. It is corrupting of the very idea of the rule of law. And when we reckon the cost of this corruption, any losses of the content industry pale in comparison.
Copyright law must be changed.
Lessig’s five suggestions for change include one that has been nigglingly obvious to me for a long time: get the emphasis off the “copy.” As Lessig puts it:
Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a “copy,” that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with “the copy,” and focus instead on uses — like public distributions of copyrighted work — that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.
Lessig ends with a call for an end to the war against the wrong enemy. I would add that we have to stop calling sharing and creating “piracy.” The real piracy is that perpetrated by the likes of Hollywood studios, raiding Irish pre-schools and demanding ransom.
The war on peer-to-peer file-sharing is a failure. After a decade of fighting, the law has neither slowed file sharing, nor compensated artists. We should sue not kids, but for peace, and build upon a host of proposals that would assure that artists get paid for their work, without trying to stop “sharing.”
