"If you were put in charge of stopping online piracy, what would you do?"

[cos]

Someone asked that question on reddit. This was my hasty off the cuff reply:

I'd stop calling it piracy, and make it clear that copyright violation is different from "theft" and does not respond to the same treatment.

I'd get people to focus on the fact that copyright's purpose is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" - it's a means to an end, not an inherent right we are morally bound to honor. When we've structured our laws such that copyright is not designed to meet the ends it was intended for, that causes the system to fail. If we want copyright to be a success, we need to re-frame how we look at it, with the real ends in mind.

One especially glaring problem with today's copyright system in the US is that it is designed to protect the profits of those who have already succeeded, against the opportunity of those who are creating new work now and will do so in the future. In other words, today's copyright law serves more to retard the progress of the arts, than to promote it.

This also promotes a general lack of respect for copyright among the people, and no enforcement mechanism can compensate for that. We need to restore respect for copyright by doing things like severely cutting back how long it applies back to a "limited time" (Mickey Mouse needs to finally fall into the public domain!) and aggressively defending and expanding fair use. Then we could focus on cutting down copyright infringement that really is bad, the sort of stuff most people would support fighting. Social support for copyright infringement today is immense, and there's good reason for that, but it makes enforcement impractical.

Once there's greater respect for copyright, and a greater public sphere of fair use and public domain, I'd try to get industry and government and nonprofits and other groups together to tackle the problem of how to make it easy for people to pay for stuff and how to make stuff they pay for easy to use and own and manage in the ways they want to, including making backups, copying to other devices, and giving away to their friends. We need another re-framing, a shift from reliance on restriction to reliance on opportunity. One of the biggest reasons people copy stuff illegally today is that the free illegal copies are both easier to get and better than the legal copies, which are restricted both in their distribution and functionality. We need to flip that around.

P.S. What I wouldn't do is propose Internet blocklists and censorship of links, but that's what Congress is considering currently. If you're in the US, have you called your US Representative and both US Senators recently to ask them to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA)?

[Poll #1805350]

Comments

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

Technically I'm not in the US, but I'm still a registered voter, so I called anyhow :)

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

My only quibble is that when legal rights are granted and acted upon, even if they shouldn't have been granted, revoking them is problematic at best. For instance, there must be those whose business is in large part as middlemen of some sort handling intellectual property. Change the future value of those copyrights that they borrowed money to get and you bankrupt them.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the point, but how the heck is this different from any other investment? There's not much guaranteed in this world beyond bonds, and even bond buyers are SOL these days if they happened to buy them from the wrong country.

That's the thing about money; sometimes you get the shaft. It's not unprecedented for governments to make rules that turn out to cost someone a lot of dough. Suppose I buy a tract of land intending to build a shopping mall and six months later it turns out, whoops, there's a wetland there, or a habitat of some woefully endangered species, or something else. If I understand correctly, the government is in its rights to prevent me from developing that land. Or if they decide that my shopping-mall site is the best place for a bypass, and I bid for the site not on the basis of the land value alone but on the basis of that plus what I could do with the land, I'm not confident the government's eminent domain dollars will make me whole.

I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm not saying it's awesome, but in this world I think neither of these things is dispositive.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

No, my argument was not meant to be dispositive. But it does argue for gradual change. I think it would be just fine to limit copyright to 30 years, which is a radical change. But if you did something like that, there should be a semi-grandfather clause that would give seven years before the change took effect.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that makes some sense!

[cos]

"problematic at worst" would be more accurate, IMO.

You have a point in this sense: Consistency has value, in that it allows people to plan and build for the future. Unnecessary changes of law should be avoided for this reason.

However, that's a very weak argument for preserving the consistency of *wrong* or *bad* law. Only if the wrongness or badness of the law in question is quite mild, should anyone be swayed by this line of reasoning, IMO.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I think it''s more often a sound argument that corrective changes should be gradual.

[wotw]

barkingiguana:

Schoolyard bullies spend years honing their bullying skills, and a crackdown on bullying can
destroy the value of those skills overnight. Does it follow that any crackdown on bullying
should be gradual? Slaveowners build great enterprises that will become worthless overnight
if slaves are emancipated; does it follow that any emancipation should be gradual?

I am not convinced (or at least not as convinced as I think cos is) that intellectual
property lawyers are engaged in antisocial activities. But for one who DOES believe that,
I don't see where the "gradual change" argument should hold any water. There's an
argument for sending the message that "If you're doing something antisocial, even if it's
legal, nobody's going to have any sympathy for you when we eventually get around to
outlawing it".

I can also see arguments AGAINST sending this message, because the stuff we get around to
outlawing isn't always antisocial. But I do think your argument is a lot more problematic
than it looks.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

I think it depends on the nature of the "antisocial" activity. Under many circumstances, living by bad rules that you may have supported, opposed, or been indifferent to is less egregious than setting up those rules with the intent of profiting from them.

In this case, I don't think Disney has an ethical leg to stand on; they are responsible in large part for the creation of the rules and should take almost whatever consequences there are of changing them. But I don't think the same can be said of whatever support businesses have grown up in the niches that the rules provide.

To take another example, I'd like to see private funding of electoral campaigns essentially eliminated. But if a candidate, playing under the current rules (who may well oppose the current rules, but they're the only rules in effect) has spent most of her/his early effort getting small donations and the database of donors who may give more, that candidate would be rightly aggrieved if the law changed in the middle of the campaign.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

What's strange to me is there's still not a general technical solution to copyright and copy protection in that, ok, if the purpose is to make sure the creators of something get supported by the consumption of their creations, then why not have a system that makes it easy to pay for something post-consumption instead of before making a copy?

Among other things, if we had that for books and music it would partly ale iate the financial woes of people who are old and no longer producing new works and whose works are no longer in print because the Industry is that way, but whose work is still loved and gets passed around between friends or on the used markets, etc.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

well, wrote rather than called.

[cos]

*nod*

I phrased my poll to be specifically about calling because when it comes to influencing legislators about current legislation, that is by far the most effective contact method short of going to their office in person.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

You're much closer to the field than I am these days, but are you including hand written snail mail? from what I've read, the effort that that shows gives it more quite a bit more weight than calling.

[cos]

It may vary from office to office, but in general, snail mail is far far far less effective than phone calls. Perhaps the biggest reason is that it gets there too late. Especially since the added mail-delaying security measures they put in after the anthrax attacks. Another reason is that phone calls directly engage staffers and keep an issue on their minds. A lot of calls on a single issue make an impression. Letters, on the other hand, you can put aside to read when convenient, and block out time in your schedule for it, so the volume is less vivid. Getting 20 calls about the same issue on the same day feels different in a way that getting 20 letters which you can space out reading over the course of the week, doesn't. Especially if the calls keep coming - when a letter arrives, you don't know what it's about.

P.S. You can actually ask questions during a phone call. You can react to what they say, and comment on it. They can hear what you sound like. Two-way communication is another reason why it's more effective.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

I assume the person you are talking to is not your congressman or senator, but a staffer. Does the give and take with the staffer actually accomplish anything? I guess if you actually persuade the staffer of your point of view, you can hope that they then try to influence your legislator. But that seems like a long shot. I've always assumed that the end result of your phone call was an aggregated report to your legislator of "83 people called in opposition to PIPA; 17 in favor". Which seems at best the same as a letter, and possibly worse (since the legislator might choose to read some of the letters).

[cos]

No, the legislator's not gonna read your letter. Letters definitely result in a +/- report of the sort you describe. Maaaybe the legislator will read a few letters, but it's highly unlikely yours will be one of them.

Thinking it's a "long shot" that a staffer will influence their legislator, while at the same time considering seriously the possibility that a letter will do so, is backwards in the extreme. Letters are inert pieces of paper. Staffers are people the legislator talks to every day, and who do all the work to formulate the legislator's policy. They're the people who do the research, find the facts, book the meetings, communicate with staffers in other offices, write language for legislation (well, except for the all-to-frequent case where corporations or lobbyists submit language and it gets copied in verbatim), and so on. If staffers can't influence the legislator, nobody can.

Letters are a long shot when compared to phone calls.

Edit: I should reiterate what I said above: this varies by office. Probably there are some exceptions, where the average impact of a letter may be closer to the average impact of a phone call.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

OK, I think you've convinced me. Calling is easier than writing, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't just rationalizing laziness. But your arguments are persuasive, so now I can do the easier thing with a clear conscience!

[cos]

For best effectiveness, I recommend asking questions of the sort that will get them to transfer you to the staffer responsible for the particular issue (or you could try just asking, "who deals with telecommunications policy?"). If you have an interesting question and actually try to get an answer, it can lead to a more substantive conversation. Or to voicemail and a call back.

[kirin]

Indeed. "Competing with free" is difficult, but many people have shown it is not impossible, and it's almost certainly easier than attempting to eliminating free in any meaningful way.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I wrote a letter to each of the NJ delegation the week before Thanksgiving. So far I've got one positive and one negative reply.

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Honestly I don't bother calling my rep every time because he votes how I want him to. Pete Stark is awesome.

[cos]

Not every time, but I hope sometimes?

Legislators do more than vote, though, and knowing what their constituents care about can drive what they put their energy towards.

Also, legislators are used to getting lots of complaints from people who don't like what they do, but hardly any praise from those who like what they do. A very little bit of positive reinforcement means an awful lot to them, especially because of it stands out because they get so few such calls.

P.S. Senator Feinstein seems to be entirely clueless about SOPA and could definitely use some calls. (that post is from ten days ago, so maybe she's figured something out since then... I hope)

[drwex]

have you seen this yet? http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html
I'm still in the middle of watching it, but i think Cory hit the nail on the head again.