"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

[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.