Aug 09
6
Content Sharing – It Is Not A Crime
Yesterday Rupert Murdoch unequivocally announced that soon he intends for people to have to pay to access content from his newspaper brands.
He also announced very substantial losses for News Corp. Now those losses that were announced may actually be opportunistic write downs, that will enable greater profits to be announced in future quarters. So it is hard to know what the absolute truth is about the state of News.
This morning I went on the Sydney Morning Herald web site to check the news. Normally I buy the paper, because I like to do the crossword on paper rather than online. On Fridays the cryptic crossword is created by someone who has a really oblique concept of clues, so I tend not to buy the paper on Fridays. For a change, today, I looked at the crossword online. There was a big announcement on the web page to the effect that from August 31st there would no longer be an online version of the crossword.
Could it be that Fairfax has figured out that its “news” is not what sells its physical papers, and that subscribers to the physical good purchase because of value adds like the crossword?
So Fairfax, the publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, are taking a softer option than Murdoch, not making a song and dance about charging, but taking a tactical position to try to shore up sales of the physical good, nevertheless.
At the same time that this is happening in the foreground, there is the continuing battle between music companies in the US and downloaders. In spite of the fact that some months ago the music industry announced that it was not going to pursue individual downloaders there are continuing actions before the courts.
In one that was ruled on by the judge in the last week a student was found guilty of sharing files and was fined US$675,000!
Clearly he is not going to be able to pay the fine as a student, and has in any event announced an appeal.
Let’s join all this together.
If I want to read a news story and it is behind a “walled garden” all I really need to do is to google it. Someone, somewhere who is a subscriber to the relevant journal will have decided to share that story with the world, and I will be able to access it….
So what happens in a world where judge’s fine copyright offenders in the hundreds of millions of dollars?
What happens is that the guilty people will not be able to pay the fines, and therefore will get sent to jail.
The jails will fill up – as if they are not full already – so that will be a bad thing…
Actually it will be a good thing – certainly for the proprietors of the jails (jails are now either on the way to being privatised or have already been). So that will mean more dollars for the owners of the jails.
Actually that will be a bad thing – because the costs of those privatized jails and their populations are paid for by us, the taxpayers.
Doesn’t this remind you of the way that Australia was populated? People who were starving and stole a loaf of bread who were sent to the colonies for the terms of their natural lives…
So I can see a future where people who get content from Mr Murdoch’s papers illicitly end up in front of a judge getting fined for reading the news…
Unless of course governments and people start to see reason about copyright.
Copyright means literally the right to copy. Everyone with a computer and an internet connection has the means to copy. When copyright was first conceived it served to protect the kings of Englandensuring that only some printers had the right to print stuff. Which meant that pamphleteers who wrote stuff that was critical of the king could be thrown in jail.
Fortunately back then good sense prevailed and the Westminster system came into being and the kings became figureheads rather than rulers.
Now we need good sense to prevail again, so that people who electronically copy things without making any profit from that activity, are not deemed to be criminals.
There needs to be clarity as to the right to copy digitally and disseminate. If you make money from it, you are a criminal and have broken the law. If you share material without making money, you should be able to do it freely.
That means that anyone running a website for instance that includes ads and therefore has an intent to profit, and who also shares copyright content, should be able to prosecuted. The same person, with no ads, should be able to keep on doing it. This will mean that venture capitalists will be very careful about what they invest in, and that will mean that any website that shares content will only ever run on a small scale.
It will mean that people will continue to share movies, books, music and other things via P2P networks. For those in the copyright industry who read this – think about it – it is no different from how it has been for years. People have been taking books out of libraries, recording music from the radio, copying video tapes etc for years. Sure the scale of P2P may be bigger but the underlying rationale remains the same. Only those who profit from copying should be criminalized.
Murdoch should remember his heritage as an Australian. A great country founded on the sweat and effort of convicts many of whom were sent there just because they stole food to put in their families’ mouths.
Lets not continue the charade that not for profit content sharing is wrong. That is the crime.