Mar 09
5
P2P Is Not Piracy
The Rand Corporation, a think tank that provides insights into a number of global strategic issues, has just issued a report on the possible connection between Piracy and organized crime.
The report concludes that while Piracy of movies and music may seem like a relatively innocuous crime, the proceeds of the crime may support terrorism and significant criminal activities. This is something that we should be concerned about.
However in the early paragraphs of the release, it says:
Much film piracy involves making copies to share with friends or individuals swapping copies on the Internet, activities that usually do not generate any payment. The RAND report, supported by a grant from the Motion Picture Association, was intended to examine to what extent criminal and terrorist groups are engaging in counterfeiting, using film piracy as an example.
The implications that one may draw from this is that P2P file sharing has some relevance to the topic – which is terrorism and organized crime. The reality of what it says is exactly the opposite – classic manipulation of the readers’ emotions so that their recollection of the article is that P2P is somehow linked to terrorism.
While it is entirely possible that a terrorist may share files using P2P, it does not follow that P2Pers are terrorists.
We need to differentiate quite clearly that Pirates are those that profit from stealing content and selling it. People who share content with each other, for no financial benefit, may be small “p” pirates, just like there are small “l” liberals. I, personally, don’t download movies from the Internet. But I know plenty of people who do, just like I know plenty of people who copy DVD’s… They rent the DVD, burn it, return the DVD to the store and keep a copy in their library. These people don’t use P2P, but they effectively do the same thing as the P2Per.
People who do this are the majority of our population. You just can’t criminalize the majority of people in society. The fault lies with the content companies for not establishing early a precedent of a royalty on storage media to compensate for the possibility of people making digital copies. The content companies haven’t done that (in Australia) because they have wanted to keep their options open with regard to what they do, and because they have feared that whatever deal they got from a copyright tribunal, would at some time in the future, and in retrospect, seem to be cheap. So to prevent them ever looking like suckers, and driven by their colleagues in the US in particular, they mount a massive ongoing PR campaign to make everyone who uses the Internet to share content, into criminals.
(Further thoughts on this added 7th March 2007):
Copyright law shows that copyright owners hold the right to duplicate and to communicate their copyrights, regardless of whether there is financial gain or not. That would mean that every time anyone transfers a digital file from one device to another there may potentially be a breach of copyright.
The point here is that copyright owners are quite well aware of this, and do nothing about it. They do nothing for a variety of reasons – one of the key ones being that if they had to show up in court and prosecute an action they would have to show clear chain of title. That opens up a can of worms for them in some respects: First they may not be able to easily show chain of title (if the rights are from an overseas publisher, it is quite likely that they will not want their agreements discussed in court because that would mean that the legitimacy of the agreement itself may be called into question. In the case of a locally created copyright the chain of title may be relatively easy to establish, but the internal workings of the publisher, record company, or other entity – including tax structures would very possibly become visible to the Tax Department. So the fact is that copyright owners talk loud and carry a big stick. And probably at some point they will take action, but only when they think they are on very solid ground.
What needs to happen is for ordinary people to speak with one voice. What we need to do is to announce quite clearly that we may have infringing material in our possession and invite content owners to sue if they think there may be a case, and if not to understand that they have had their chance to pursue the matter, and that they should now know that the opportunity to establish whether there is an infringement or not is in the past.
Then content owners should concentrate their efforts on the real criminals the capital “P” Pirates.