The student rebels are back. College campuses, which have remained largely unstirred by the Iraq War, global warming, and the other geopolitical controversies of the day, are emerging from their slumbers, as a new generation of protesters begins to organize and mobilize. It’s not the fight against war or pollution or genocide that’s behind the new movement. It’s the battle to protect our right to download pop songs for free.
Zachary McCune, a sophomore at Brown and cofounder of the school’s chapter of the anti-copyright group Students for Free Culture, puts it all into perspective in an interview with the New York Times:
People wonder why college students aren’t rallying more around the Iraq war. If there were a draft, we probably would be. Students are so quick to fight for this cause because we’re the ones bearing the burden.
And what a burden it is.
Now, now, yu’re being a fuddy-duddy, but he’s right – they’re personally affected, whereas the Big Issues are not so starkly in front of them. Everyone can’t be having Deep Imporant Thoughts all the time.
This is most interesting as a generational phenomenon: a whole generation of kids has absolutely no compunction about piracy. There’s no stopping it now, and creators of content/software will have to figure out other ways to make money.
Coming soon: Photoshop, brought to you by ads that get inserted into all the photos you edit.
Deja vu, anyone? Remember the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 ? Its sponsor was a Senator named Al Gore from Tennessee – didn’t he invent the Internet? Well, record companies, particularly those in Nashville, were absolutely outraged that illegal duplicating of CDs was cutting into their profits. Remember all the headlines as the record labels went bankrupt? I guess people have forgotten that there is actually a tax levied whenever you buy a CD or player that goes into a special fund administered by the Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies to compensates the copyright holders for alleged illegal copying. You get taxed even if you have never copied a CD in you life – makes me think of the Boston Tea Party. This law did protect home users who wanted to make a few personal copies as long as it was not for non-commercial purposes. Oh, and BTW, don’t mention that most of the flood of pirated copies of content and software is actually coming from Asia not here in America.
The problem is that front companies like Media Defender are actually masquerading as peer-to-peer clients like Limewire and Kazan using the Guntella protocol to make queries about files stored on private users machines and posting trojan copies of files to track data flows. Even worse, they are domestic spies breaking into the machines of users, many of whom are completely unaware of how the software works, and matching file names, dates, times and gathering other information personal information.
Where is the privacy protection there? There is no law like AHRA that defines copyrights in the age of the Internet and peer-to-peer networks where in the virtual world, your neighbor is not next door but a across the globe. The lawyers are applying laws intended for physical media to peer-to-peer software, where contracts and purchases are involved. In the absence of laws like AHRA for peer-to-peer, it looks like the lawyers simply doing it because they can. You can read blogs like Recording Industry vs. The People for more information about what these guys are doing. I don’t hear these companies calling for IPV8 with data stream filtering that would allow the blocking of copyrighted material at the ISP level. I guess its just more fun and profitable for lawyer to “beat up” poor innocent college kids who are only doing what the ISPs and software vendors are condoning with a nod and a wink all the way to the bank.
Did print die with the invention of the Xerox machine? Last time I checked Amazon was doing pretty well, and the library down the street hasn’t closed yet. It just may be that intellectual property as we know it is dead. The future might hold some new paradigm: content creators might have to finance their work by other means than selling media or downloaded content. Are the major artists really hurting financialy and going bankrupt or are the content vendors worried about loosing their jobs? Personally, I think artists are right to be concerned about his, but, sticking some poor nineteen year old kid struggling to get through college with a lawsuit is the wrong way to handle it. Its a academic civics lesson about corporate lawyers they are definitely not going to forget.
Remember: “Don’t copy that floppy!”
These people are not really interested in Lessig’s concept of “Free Culture”. What they want is bread and circuses: free pop culture. They want to be entertained for free. They want it created and performed by people from their own demographic with an accompanying video so that nothing is left to the imagination. They don’t want a 20 second sample, they want the whole track. They lack the creativity (or the will) to go out and create culture.
If they must hear music, let them listen to the radio with its ads. Or to Radiohead. Mama Cass is long gone, but whatever happened to “Make Your Own Kind of Music”? Let them listen to Cake. Problem solved: piece of cake.
Actually, Sally, we *are* very interested in Lessig’s concept of free culture. In fact, our group has done little to nothing on the p2p issue, and we do *not* support or condone illegal file-sharing.
Here are some examples of projects we’re working on at Harvard:
If all of that isn’t “Lessigian,” then I don’t know what is.
I stand corrected. “Free culture” probably means different things to different people. To some people, I suppose it primarily means pop culture. I still search more for the Cathedral rather than the Bazaar. The Library rather than the Saloon. The Classics, the best of all literature, important current events and modern science rather than pop culture. I want it to be fun, but I want to learn something in the academic sense as well. I guess I am looking for free quality education. It is a tall order, but it might be worth it.