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Copyright Infringement

The same type of hypocrisy we see with recreational drugs
 
 
The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality

I’ve been doing a good deal of speaking recently. And in one of my talks, I tell an anecdote about a lesson I learned from my own readers.

NY Times Blogs / Original article
20th Dec, 2007

It was early in 2005, and a little hackware program called PyMusique was making the rounds of the Internet. PyMusique was written for one reason only: to strip the copy protection off of songs from the iTunes music store.
The program’s existence had triggered an online controversy about the pros, cons and implications of copy protection. But to me, there wasn’t much gray area. “To me, it’s obvious that PyMusique is designed to facilitate illegal song-swapping online,” I wrote. And therefore, it’s wrong to use it.
Readers fired back with an amazingly intelligent array of counterexamples: situations where duplicating a CD or DVD may be illegal, but isn’t necessarily *wrong.* They led me down a garden path of exceptions, proving that what seemed so black-and-white to me is a spectrum of grays.

I was so impressed that I incorporated their examples into a little demonstration in this particular talk. I tell the audience: “I’m going to describe some scenarios to you. Raise your hand if you think what I’m describing is wrong.”
Then I lead them down the same garden path:
“I borrow a CD from the library. Who thinks that’s wrong?” (No hands go up.)
“I own a certain CD, but it got scratched. So I borrow the same CD from the library and rip it to my computer.” (A couple of hands.)
“I have 2,000 vinyl records. So I borrow some of the same albums on CD from the library and rip those.”
“I buy a DVD. But I’m worried about its longevity; I have a three-year-old. So I make a safety copy.”
With each question, more hands go up; more people think what I’m describing is wrong.
Then I try another tack:
“I record a movie off of HBO using my DVD burner. Who thinks that’s wrong?” (No hands go up. Of course not; time-shifting is not only morally O.K., it’s actually legal.)
“I *meant* to record an HBO movie, but my recorder malfunctioned. But my buddy recorded it. Can I copy his DVD?” (A few hands.)
“I meant to record an HBO movie, but my recorder malfunctioned and I don’t have a buddy who recorded it. So I rent the movie from Blockbuster and copy that.” (More hands.)
And so on.
The exercise is intended, of course, to illustrate how many shades of wrongness there are, and how many different opinions. Almost always, there’s a lot of murmuring, raised eyebrows and chuckling.
Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I’d ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.
In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.
Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.”
There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.
“Who thinks that might be wrong?”
Two hands out of 500.
Now, maybe there was some peer pressure involved; nobody wants to look like a goody-goody.
Maybe all this is obvious to you, and maybe you could have predicted it. But to see this vivid demonstration of the generational divide, in person, blew me away.
I don’t pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I’m increasingly convinced that copy protection isn’t it.)
I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies’ problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can’t even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?
 
Responses:
 
December 20th, 2007
1:30 pm

Look at a CD today. How is it different from the CD’s you purchased 20 years ago? There isn’t any difference. It’s still a flimsy disc that gets easily scratched.
It’s in a CD case that gets scratched and broken in next to no time (this case hasn’t changed in the slightest after 20 years of existence). The case is wrapped in cellophane that is still a nightmare to remove (same as 20 years ago). The printed material inside the case is, at best, average quality fare with microscopic printing of the lyrics. The CD is only very occasionally “enhanced” i.e. with (if you’re lucky) an average resolution AVI of the main title’s video clip.
The difference in material cost between a CD and a DVD is peanuts, yet the studios still haven’t transferred music CD to DVD, which would allow them to considerably enrich the content at very low additional cost. That would increase dramatically the gigabyte count, which would already tend to decrease the appeal of music downloading.
The tactile experience of handling CD’s and DVD’s is a pretty dim one. The music and film industries don’t have research/engineering departments (it seems) to look into this side of things. You still have to press down on the raised nipple at the center of the DVD and then wait with baited breath to see what will happen… will it spring out and land on the floor?… or will it slip and scratch?… how hard will you have to push?… it varies a lot doesn’t it?
The full price of a newly released DVD is outrageously expensive yet the majors still believe they have a divine right to demand this price in the market place. 99% of consumers are sending the message that it’s too much to pay, and the majors still aren’t hearing them.
The power brokers in the film industry are 50 year olds who have been in the same industry for donkey’s years; they came up through the ranks during the heyday of the music CD and became accustomed to a market place of captive consumers; a segment that stayed unbelievably profitable for an inordinate length of time. Until, of course, disruptive technology (the Internet) came along. And what did those fat cats do? They cried foul. Well, of course they did. They’ve been shielded from the realities of real competition for too long; they just don’t have that business experience.
In the meantime, “going to the movies” or “listening to music” is no longer the only form of entertainment for young people, or old people for that matter. The competition for our time now includes video games (already a larger industry than the movie industry), mobile telephony (talk or text), cheap airline travel, Internet surfing and chatting… all these things have eroded the original total market available to cinema-going and music-listening. Yet the fat cats are still convinced that ONLY piracy is to blame for their difficulties.
How blind can they get? The solution for them is to make the CD/DVD purchase and use experience about 100 times more attractive than it is at the moment. Starting with… reasonably priced, easy-to-open, disc always pops out in the same way, case is classy non-scratch and pleasant to hold and feel (would you sell chocolates in these shitty cases?), disc is new generation non-scratch (except for maybe a diamond), content is twice as rich as currently… etc etc. In other words, no longer treat the consumer like a second class citizen.
I could go on…

— Posted by paul


9.December 20th, 2007
1:34 pm

Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that your college audience sees the record companies, the movie studios, the RIAA, the MPAA, etc. as the “enemy”. They believe that the industry that produces the entertainment that they desire is nothing more than an unreasonable greed machine that is out to rip them off in any and every way that it can. A parallel, in their minds, might be the idea of stealing from the burglar who stole from them. Is this wrong? They don’t think so. Are they justified in their feeling? Partly. The industry has, especially in the early years of digital media, overreacted and made their customers feel like thieves by default. If the industry had shown trust, they wouldn’t have fostered the feeling that now exists.

An example of where a company has fostered trust is the book publisher Baen. All of their books are available as ebooks. None of their books have DRM. Heck, I can even download their books in RTF format and do what I please with them. They even give away a large number of books to get you “hooked”. According to Baen, this entire program has been incredibly successful – in the midst of another industry that is otherwise stumbling due to its fear of its own customers.

This is not to say that those who download with abandon are blameless, in many ways they actually contribute the problems they rile against, but it does, in some small degree, demonstrate what’s wrong here and why you got the reaction you got: treat people like they have no morals and pretty soon, you get people with no morals.

— Posted by Jay