"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

[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.