On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 04:04:24PM -0600, Michael Halcrow wrote: > http://newsnet.byu.edu/story.cfm/54325
It's been a while since I've written a rant on the subject. This will never get published by the Daily Universe, but I have it published on my own web site: http://halcrow.us/~mhalcrow/daily_universe_copyright.html Since when did the Daily Universe staff become the PR front for the Recording Industry Association of America? The tired rhetoric they regurgitated in their amateur treatment of the subject matter in their editorial, ``Want a revolution? Get in tune, but do it legally'' was about as enlightening as a John Ashcroft speech at a Republican convention. I will begin my response by correcting the Daily Universe's embarrassing inaccuracies, and then proceed to actually discuss the issue on a level worthy of conscious thought. In the first place, there is no legal precedent to support the claim that downloading music over the Internet is an illegal act. Hundreds of individuals, from 12-year-olds to grandmothers, have been racketed with law suits from the RIAA for distributing copyrighted content, but there is not a solitary case of an individual being sued civilly or prosecuted criminally for merely downloading music. The Daily Universe editors have obviously not done their homework, as they repeatedly asserted that downloaders are being tracked down. They simply are not. To assert that they are is plainly irresponsible journalism. ``Intellectual property'' is a term that makes absolutely no sense to me, whatsoever. Music, motion pictures, written stories, still images, mathematical formulas, business processes, machine designs, even computer code -- this is the stuff that our culture is made of. These things define the experience of life itself. How can you assign exclusive ownership to culture? How can you presume to tell people that the primitive act of transferring this information from one mind to another is somehow immoral? Real property has an attribute that information lacks: scarcity. If I take a CD from you, then I have the CD, and you do not. If, on the other hand, I copy the contents of the CD, then you still have the CD. Furthermore, I have the contents of the CD, which I can burn to a CD-R. The net result is that there are functionally two copies of the information on that CD. And the money I would have spent on the CD can now go to concert tickets. In the end, the society is richer for it. ``Intellectual property'' pundits will decry the proliferation of information-distributing technology because it threatens their Luddite vision of how the economy should operate. The claim that strong copyright and patent laws are necessary to spurn innovation is a questionable one, at best. Throughout history, mankind has managed to produce masterpiece inventions and works of art without such laws. Today, the microcosm of the Free Software phenomenon provides ample evidence of the progress that can be made as the attitude of information hoarding is relented. In the process of establishing a protectionist bubble around the media middleman, we have succeeded in creating a schizophrenic society. On the one hand are the traditional interests that depend on the control over the instantiation of information (i.e., a book or a video cassette) to turn a profit. Suddenly, with the advent of the personal computer and the Internet, information no longer requires static instantiation in order to find its way into our brains. The response of the obsolete parties is to attempt to shoehorn property laws into this new technological paradigm. They commit the crime of injecting false moral premises into the minds of the populace via their dear cousin, the popular media. They violate our legislature with lobbyists who think nothing of desecrating the Constitutional scope and limits of copyright. Sadly, these lobbyists have ensnared Utah's own Orrin G. Hatch, who has for years worked militantly to establish a digital police state. On the other hand, we have the individual, who acts on instinct to share with people he cares about and loves, and then is told that he is a bad person for wanting to do so. This mindset is a cancer on our society. Young students who sketch masterpieces are now being told that they are making unauthorized duplications, and they are being kicked out of museums. Sightseers who are taking pictures of statues in public parks are being heckled and run out by police officers who are ``protecting the copyright'' that the statues are under. Individual freedom is being ruthlessly trampled upon, culture is being held hostage, and the Daily Universe editorial staff can only manage to stand on the sidelines and cheer such a disgustingly oppressive system on. I wish to make one other thing abundantly clear. The Daily Universe staff flippantly referred to copying as a privilege. Copying is not a privilege. It is a right. We are born with the natural right to copy. Society has decided to spend our freedom to copy in an attempt to stimulate the production of more intellectual works. There is a very strong argument that this restriction of our right to copy, in an attempt to redistribute wealth in our ``free enterprise,'' ends up doing us more harm than good. The thought pattern of locking down and hoarding information that is permeating our nation's psyche is crippling scientific and intellectual progress. If the concept of ``intellectual property'' does indeed lie at the foundation of our economy, as the crack team of editors at the Daily Universe claim, then we are in desperate trouble. In case nobody has noticed, globalization is the modus operandi of our modern economy, and the rest of the world is not about to bow to the declarations of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Furthermore, ``intellectual property'' deserves no part in a ``free enterprise.'' The concept of copyrights and patents has absolutely nothing to do with freedom; it instead has everything to do with the limitation thereof. Many in positions of economic and political power are asserting that you do not have a right to culture, except under the terms of the corporations that control its dissemination. The last sentence of the Daily Universe's pathetic attempt at an editorial may be correct, if not inadvertently, and ironically, so. Technology is indeed being held back -- by criminalizing technology that threatens the profit margins of obsolete business models. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has succeeded in stifling academic research in the area of cryptography. A security researcher, Dmitry Sklyarov, while visiting the United States to present at a security conference, found himself sitting in a jail cell for several weeks, separated from his family back in Russia, after Adobe Systems pressed charges against him in a shocking and immoral abuse of law. Academic conference papers have been squelched as professors have feared criminal charges for publishing their analysis of mathematical methods employed in cryptographic applications. What is happening in our society is nothing short of a travesty. Finally, if the Daily Universe staff want to convince us of their agenda of media power aggrandizement, I suggest they use reason and logic rather than an appeal to force (i.e., ``You will be hunted down and punished.''). I would have addressed the Daily Universe staff by name, but they appear to be too cowardly to actually sign their names to the petty threats that they put in print. Perhaps it is for the best. After all, they would not want their future careers in journalism to be so thoroughly tainted with this drivel. Michael Halcrow Austin, Texas .___________________________________________________________________. "Why adults should pretend to omniscience before 6-year-olds, I can't for the life of me understand." - Carl Sagan
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