This set of laws was written for a totally different time, for a totally different technology, and every time in the past, when technology has changed, the law has updated to take account for new technology — until the Internet. Now the Internet comes along and they reinforce the old method of distribution and old business model because they're extraordinarily powerful lobbyists.
Waagner: It's penalizing a kid's curiosity about music. I think the opportunity to find music, and not at the expense of going and buying import records at $20 a pop to discover that you don't like 70 percent of them is probably a lot healthier for the industry as a whole. But then parents are caught in this paradigm of, "Oh, my God, is my kid breaking the law in his room?" I always kind of joke [that parents are thinking], "Oh, thank God, I thought he was surfing porn, but he's only stealing music!"
And the parental reaction to these RIAA lawsuits seems to be, "OK, you're grounded, but you don't deserve to go to jail or be fined $5,000."
Lessig: In [my] book that's coming out ["Free Culture"], I tell the story of one of these kids, one of the four [college] students sued by the RIAA.
Jesse Jordan, who's at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, built a search engine — kind of like a Google device, that sat on the RPI network and scoured the RPI network for all files in the public directories. [The program] put together a list of a million files; three-quarters of those files had nothing to do with music. He was not selling access, he was not making any money, he was just tinkering with technology on the network that he was at school with.
[The RIAA] came in and said he was guilty of willful copyright infringement, they filed a lawsuit against him which claimed damages of between $10 million and $15 million. [The RIAA then offered to settle for $12,000.]
So, he's faced with this your-money-or-your-life option, and what does he do? What any rational person would do, turned over all his money.
Now, the point is, they then used this as evidence of how they're advancing the great morality of defending the record companies, but I think that is deeply immoral, what they did. This is scapegoat-ism against the weak. They don't go suing Google or Yahoo, they pick the weakest people to set a precedent.
And innovation itself is stifled in this atmosphere.
Lessig: Our tradition forever, especially in music, or even outside music, has been [that] creators have been able to build upon the culture around them and that came before them. All of Disney's great work is built upon stuff that was in the public domain.
Article comments
1 - Martin Blank
I think without a doubt the Internet can be employed as a fabulous tool to promote bands to semi-stardom who otherwise would have never been heard anywhere, anytime, outside their home towns and perhaps a very tiny worldwide cult following. But, I firmly believe that the amount of play in copyright and licensing is up to the artist -- music, literature, film, etc. This is why the "mash license" intrigues me: it gives the original artist greater flexibility in saying, You can use this for reasonable interpretations, or, without issuing such a license, You may never use this under any circumstances whatsoever without paying me.
I further believe that Cory Doctorow is a hack and a blemish on contemporary literature -- granted, I am no doubt overly picky when it comes to novelists -- but he has done the writing community a great service with his most recent book: he proved that you can release a novel for absolutely no cost via the Internet and not remarkably undermine retail sales of the book.
On the other hand -- one must love symmetry! -- the fact that you may so freely publish books or music on the Internet, no editorial and production talent involved, puts the onus on the unwashed masses to separate the meritorious from the schlock, to send the *real* hero up the pop charts. Are the filthy rabble up to the task?