Re: "My dad is a pirate."

[Ignoramus23193]

Here's another great article on the subject, coming from LA Times
(hardly a bastion of extremism).

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-healey18feb18,0,6023873,print.story

>From the Los Angeles Times
OPINION DAILY
File ~sharing~ or ~stealing~?
The semantic debate over whether copyright infringement is theft.
By Jon Healey

February 18, 2008

A few days ago I came across an Op-Ed submission that called for file sharing 
to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued 
me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid, is a member of the 
Swedish Parliament from the Moderate party ~ a pro-business party that's akin 
to this country's Libertarians (except in Sweden they're more than just a 
fringe group). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this 
year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid's new piece added another provocative 
contention: that unauthorized downloading isn't actually theft. Here's an 
excerpt:

    In "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism", the economist and Nobel 
Prize winner F.A. Hayek explains the difference between conventional property 
rights and copyright. While the supply of material resources is limited by 
nature, the supply of an immaterial good [is] unlimited, unless the government 
limits the supply by law~. A later Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman, 
describes copyright as a monopoly that decreases supply to a level below the 
optimal level. Copyright and the regulations that follow from it should, 
according to Friedman, be described primarily as a limitation of free speech. 

In essence, Sigfrid is saying that something in unlimited supply can't be 
stolen. His position is a variation on a theme advanced by Mike Masnick of 
Techdirt.com, among others: that the entertainment industry's aggressive 
copyright-enforcement efforts spring from an outdated, analog-era notion of 
scarcity. Under this view, copyright holders are helped, not harmed, by file 
sharing and other online distribution pipelines; they just haven't adapted 
their business models to take advantage of the new opportunities. Supporters of 
this view include musicians, authors and filmmakers who say that that file 
sharing helped bring the exposure they needed to sell their works.

These aren't just academic arguments. They're ammunition in a battle that's 
raging online to shape the way the public thinks about copyrights. The first 
salvo was fired by the original Napster, which defined itself as a file-sharing 
network. That won the semantic high ground by defining unauthorized downloading 
as "sharing," not "copying" or "duplicating." The implication was that users of 
these networks were merely being generous with something they possessed, not 
usurping the rights of copyright holders.

Record labels, music publishers and movie studios contend that copyrights are 
indeed property, entitled to the same protection as a home or a car. To counter 
the notion of "sharing," they've advanced an equal powerful metaphor: 
downloading as theft. "When you go online and download songs without 
permission, you are stealing," the Recording Industry Assn. of America says on 
its website. "Piracy is theft, and pirates are thieves, plain and simple. 
Downloading a movie off of the Internet is the same as taking a DVD off a store 
shelf without paying for it," adds the Motion Picture Assn. of America. The 
imagery has been echoed by the news media, lawmakers and college 
administrators. It's even found its way into the online term-paper site 
FratFiles.com, which offers a model essay, "Illegal downloading 'is' stealing" 
(yes, there are shortcuts even for ethics assignments).

Nice image, but it's not a perfect fit. As Sigfrid noted, there's a fundamental 
difference between intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks) and 
real property (houses, cars, plasma TVs): The latter is tangible and limited in 
supply, the former is not. "Copyright infringement is not 'theft' in the same 
way that taking a CD from a store is theft," said Mark Lemley, a copyright 
expert at Stanford University Law School. "If I take your physical property, I 
have it and you no longer do. If I copy your song, I have it, but so do you."

Legal scholars aren't the only ones making that point. You'll see it again and 
again in discussions online about the propriety, morality and economic impact 
of file sharing. To Lemley, that suggests the entertainment industry's choice 
of metaphors has backfired. "Let me be clear: copyright infringement is wrong, 
and should be punished," he wrote in a recent e-mail. "But simplistic 
statements that infringement is 'just like' stealing a CD, or using a room in 
my house, are wrong. They are also counterproductive, because people 
instinctively know they are wrong, and so they are likely to ignore histrionics 
of this sort."

So what's the right metaphor? Unauthorized downloading may not be larceny, but 
it still seems to fit under the broad notion of theft. Even though the copies 
cost nothing to produce, the data in them has value. Downloaders acquire that 
value without paying for it. Some say they're not causing any real losses 
because they buy new copies of the downloaded files they like. But that 
rationalization wasn't persuasive to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who 
flatly declared in his concurring opinion in MGM vs. Grokster, "Deliberate 
unlawful copying is no less an unlawful taking of property than garden-variety 
theft."

The downloading-isn't-stealing faction makes much of the fact that 
infringements don't deprive copyright owners of their works. But that 
deprivation is not an essential element in every kind of theft. If you splice 
into your neighbor's cable wire and get 150 channels for free, you're not 
diminishing the available supply of cable TV or depriving anyone else in the 
neighborhood of it. But you're still acquiring something of value without 
paying for it, and you're doing it without the seller's permission. That's 
calledtheft of service.

Don't expect Hollywood to start likening illegal downloading to stealing cable, 
though, no matter how well the shoe fits. Cable pirates are heroes in some 
quarters, not pariahs, and the cable operators' image problems rival those of 
the RIAA and the MPAA.

More important, copyright owners want the public to view unauthorized 
downloading as shoplifting because they want intellectual property to be as 
respected by society just as much as real property is. But there's more at 
issue here than just the propriety of file sharing. The imagery associated with 
infringement also affects debates over other aspects of copyrights, such as how 
long they should last and who should be responsible for stopping piracy. 
Likening them to real property tilts the debate by making copyrights seem 
immutable, when in fact they have a specific social goal: "to promote the 
progress of science and useful arts," as the Constitution states in Article I. 
Achieving that goal means balancing the interests of content creators against 
the public's, which is a much more complicated task than erecting a legal 
barrier to five-fingered discounts.

Jon Healey is a Times editorial writer and author of the Bit Player blog. Tell 
us what you think at opinionla@latimes.com.


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