This is going to be a tough article to write, not because it covers a difficult subject (although it does), but because I’ll have the chorus of the Judas Priest song rattling around my head the whole time. I think that might be a copyright violation, but I won’t tell if you don’t!
Hands up all those who think they’re law abiding citizens? I’m sincerely hoping that we’re not seeing many hands up here, or you’re probably deluding yourself!
Lets follow this little quiz to see if you are a good honest citizen, or an evil criminal mastermind.
- Do you live in the UK?
- Do you have an iPod or other MP3 player?
- Have you copied any music from your CDs to your MP3 player?
If you can answer yes to all three of the above questions, then you’re law breaking scum. You see, the only legal way to actually have music on your iPod in the UK is to buy it from iTunes. While never actively prosecuted (to the best of my knowledge), it is not legal to copy music from a CD to another format.
A while back, the New York Times reported that iTunes sales translate roughly to 22 songs per iPod sold. Even if you take services like e-music into account, that still means that a lot of people are filling their iPod some other way.
To put this into perspective, this means that there is a very significant chance that every single person you see on the tube with those fashionable (Really? Why wasn’t I informed!? <ed>) white earphones is a law breaker. Some of the ones with black headphone cables are thieves too!
To take this a step further, a lot of music companies have been releasing music on DRM protected CDs. If you rip music from these (and I have in the past, unknowingly because it Just Worked(tm) on my Apple) then as well as breaking traditional UK copyright law, you’re violating the EUCD too.
Looking at my week in review, I’ve noticed that I really am a most dastardly soul, and yet my moral compass is quite stable and I sleep well at night. This is because I don’t feel that what I am doing is wrong, and that’s a slippery slope.
I have a well developed sense of what is right and what is wrong (ask anyone who has had to listen to one of my sanctimonious sermons!), and even though I want to be a good person, the law makes it so hard that there really is no point in trying to be law abiding.
It started out just ripping CDs. Now I find myself downloading TV shows instead of using the DVD recorder. I just don’t like the idea of adding more shiny plastic discs to landfills simply because I work odd hours and have a life away from the TV. I’m legally entitled to watch the shows because I pay Sky a fee to enable this every month and these shows are shown on there. For most of my watching over the last 6 months, it goes a step further – I pay my TV license and am entitled to watch shows on the BBC. Sadly, they’ve decided to hand competitive advantage to a convicted monopolist, so I can’t use their iPlayer to watch shows after they are broadcast.
So to recap, I’m breaking the law by watching TV shows that I pay to watch, and am allowed to record on other mediums. Genius!
My government is forcing me to live outside the law. I really don’t have much choice in a modern world because the law has not kept up with the times. And yet the government tacitly support and encourage this. Why else would they allow the sale of devices that require the law be broken for them to be useful?
At this point, we’re still only discussing consumption of media. If you actually wish to produce media, things get even harder. Lawrence Lessig, creator of the Creative Commons license gave a stunning talk at TED this year and highlighted some of the wonderful things being done with media today. The video at the link to the TED talk is worth watching just for the love song duet between Bush and his faithful ventriloquist dummy.
So where does this leave us? In a modern society, if we are told that we have to live outside the law for some things, what is this likely to do to the fabric of society? To steal from Mr. Lessig, it creates extremist attitudes on both sides. They won’t let us do anything other than consume media, so we won’t respect any of their rights. They push for longer and longer copyright terms, so people leak the CD days before it even comes out. And the band plays on…
Even if these infractions aren’t enforced or punished, this state of being is still shameful. Are we free people, or are we already living in the keiretsu culture, marching to the beat of the company morale song?
Today it’s CDs and video, but where is this going to end?
A decade ago, Richard Stallman first published his story, The Right to Read. At the time people laughed and called him an alarmist. Today we have a world where someone was held without trial for months, for producing software (that was totally legal in the country where it was developed!) that allowed among other things, blind people to read PDFs. J.K. Rowling threatens children with lawsuits over fan sites (well, she did say she wanted to encourage them to read, she didn’t say nuffink about enkuraging them to rite! <ed>)
It’s time to remind our governments what the original deal behind copyright was. We agreed to allow artists a limited monopoly on their art, in return for the generation of more unique and innovative works. We agreed to limit what we could do with things that we had to ensure that more things were created. Today, copyright is used to enforce greed and prop up failing business models, and the artists that we entered into the original agreement to protect rarely if ever see a fair share of the proceeds! Today, they want to sue you for buying their CD or DVD!
The pyramids were built around 3000 years ago. Will copyrighting them really encourage the building of new ones?