Ikalx was asking me about my views on piracy in IRC. TheBoff pointed out that's what this forum was for, so I'm posting the contents of an email I sent yesterday as a response to the Canadian Government's request for input on a bill that seeks to tighten up intellectual property protection in Canada.
Hello there,
My name is Dylan Herbert, and I am a resident of Windsor, Ontario. I care very much about the copyright issue, and make my living in the industry of website creation -- an area fraught with intellectual property concerns. I am 30 years old and a child of the computer revolution. I have thought long and hard about the necessity for intellectual property ownership law, and disagree with any attempt to tighten restrictions on usage, transmission, or reproduction of any kind of digitizable media. I shall attempt to succinctly outline my concerns below.
I take issue with the very idea of attempting tighter control of the exchange of digital media online. One concern I have is ethical, and the other is practical.
Practical: It is, technically-speaking, impossible to stop piracy. You are not stopping piracy, you are merely making criminals out of everyone. Even the most vociferous defenders of intellectual property ownership -- the monied recording industry stakeholders, for example -- are realizing that they have no sound method to stop piracy online. That is why they have turned to legislation as their only potential salvation.
Ethical: Arresting the frictionless transmission of cultural artifacts such as music, cinema, and art is essentially anti-humanist, and an inappropriate role for government in a liberal democracy. When you place hoops and hurdles in the way of the cultural dialogues of your citizens, you are slowing down the overarching conversation. You interfere with the self-actualization and quest for spiritual enlightenment of your people. A simple search query on the Creative Commons website will turn up millions of cultural artifacts -- songs, stories, videos -- created on a voluntary, public-domain-oriented basis. Noone should be under the illusion that you require the traditional protections of copyright to incentivize the production of art. The Internet, and the digital revolution in general, has so expedited the process of art production that the barrier to entry is exceedingly low. "Ordinary" citizens now participate in the cultural conversation to an unprecedented degree -- there are more works of art reaching human ears now than ever before. Any argument to the contrary, made from the accountants of prehistoric middlemen agencies like the recording industry, are the death cries of an inexorably doomed minority.
You must remain strong and lead the way into a new digital age. You should be progressive and make me proud to be Canadian. I feel the blank media tax was a decent way to reach a compromise with the IP stakeholders, and if anything should be expanded to include video and other art forms. My personal feeling is that even that is not owed to those dying middlemen, but I recognize the requirement for deals in the interest of political expediency.
Some lawmakers obviously view it as their mission to craft a seamless set of laws to "protect innovation from piracy". Some have obviously looked at the tangible factory jobs that have fled to China, and see in art an "industry" to monopolize -- without Hollywood's income, the USA's balance sheet suddenly looks much worse. They are pressuring us to conform (and in some ways to exceed!) to the draconian measures they've deployed in an effort to remain a dominant hegemonic monopolist in the propagation of cultural artifacts. I understand how that headless blob of doomed dinosaurs have come to point in the direction they do, and I understand the impact the coins in their warchest have on the politics of this.
It is your duty to safeguard our liberalism, and to EXTEND the freedoms of your citizens. I am a citizen, and I want you to safeguard MY interests, not theirs. When you join with them, you restrict my freedoms. And those freedoms are a net good to our nation.
Thank you for reading.