Mr. Nova

There are two different types of copyright infringement. There is criminal copyright and civil copyright. Criminal is where an individual breaks copyright law for a profit, or making money from infringing copyright. Civil is where the royalty rights for viewing have been ignored or incorrectly followed but no money is changing hands. Civil is by far the larger of the two groups.

Out the gate I would like to clearly states that criminal copyright is and should stay illegal. This has the most impact on entities that make and market intellectual property. Often times as they are blatantly breaking the law anyway they will steal consumer info and deploy malware in order to sustain user penetration. Bad news for everyone involved.

Civil copyright infringement is where I feel that a major restructuring of copyright law should be addressed. Let us take a look at Napster. Napster at the time was the largest music library the world had ever seen. And while this library was available music was still being produced and marketed. Meaning Metallica still made money while even though music was on the interwebs. This music library was in turn destroyed. After the rise and fall of Napster another file sharing library was built. The Gnutella Networks included services like KaZaA, Bear Share, E-Donkey, LimeWire, etc. Again in an amazing achievement of human collaboration the data complied on the Gnutella Network dwarfed that of the previous champ Napster or anything ever before in human history. And while this was open and free to use to anyone that owned a computer and had an internet connection, the major intellectual property firms still exists. They still rake in record profits and have for all intensive purposes a lock on what is and is not considered mainstream or popular media / intellectual property. Then there was/is Bit-Torrent. Bit-Torrent (BT) while extremely popular has never achieved the market saturation that Napster, Gnutella, or Lock Box (to be discussed) has, but has to be included as there is a very large amount of data that is shared in BT swarms. There are whole private communities that share via BT Swarms, and while this happens, big business media still stands firm. Then we come to the most recent of and arguably the most popular file sharing of the day. Online Lock Box or in real world terms MegaUpload. These sites are hugely popular mainly because it doesn’t chew up your home internet connection, and it’s very easy for a novice to pick up and understand. MegaUpload stood as the undisputed champ of human culture catalog. This was the largest library ever constructed in human history of intellectual property and still movie companies and record companies are still chugging along.

The point I am making here with the recent history of file sharing is that civil copyright infringement is really as old as written language. Sir William Berkeley, the governor of Virginia in 1671 said, “There are no printing presses in Virginia and as long as I am governor there never will be.” This is because pirate printers were taking the books from the king and reproducing them in mass. This would yield whole collections of infringing books to be burned as they were not official king sanctioned books. Sound familiar? In the end the quest for information won, as it has done over and over again. The printers/pirates got more creative and would evade the King or law enforcement. The end result was libraries. The government would tax the population and in return provide a public place to store knowledge for people to use. Take a moment and try to imagine the outrage that a town would give if someone burned the local library books. When history looks back on us how will the destruction of Napster, Gnutella, or MegaUpload differ?  As we look back at the grotesque punishment that went out for simply printing books, we will surely be judged for putting people in prison for life for simply sharing data and/or culture.

Moving this argument into the American structure, we as citizens are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The part you have to take a very long and serious look at is the reasonable doubt part. This has profound meaning; just ask Casey Anthony or OJ. Targeting copyright infringement through the use of public IP address, as you well know, often points to a router or a modem, not a person. Sometimes it can point to a computer itself, but that is increasingly rare.  Looking at what we know is that someone at that location or someone who uses that computer is participating in copyright infringement. But there is currently no way to know whose hands are on the keyboard at the time of the copyright violation. Furthermore, if the public IP points to a router then there is little way to know which of many computers is doing the copyright violation. It is there for reasonable to assume that any one of the users or any one of the computers could be the root of the copyright infringement(s). This doubt makes all the difference in the argument.

While your argument is that no matter how you cut it is illegal, might be true it still stands to reason that the current structure of American Law is ill-equipped to actually make this argument. The vast majority of the cases we read about are settled. This is because most people do not fully understand how the system works and thus are not willing to take the change that they could be ruled against them. I am excited in the article because it means that judges are starting to understand that the explicit doubt is very real. Also just because something is illegal does not make it a correct evaluation of public want. You consed this with your marijuana argument. Dr. King put it best.

“There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all… One who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly…I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.”

My proposed solution is to take public libraries and online lockers to the next logical step. We already subsidize big oil, sugar, and a number of other things. Reform civil copyright to conclude that sharing is permitted. Have the media companies get together (there’s only about 6 of them worldwide) and create an online exchange. This could easily be done to monitor how many times something is downloaded, or accessed. And the more it is used then the parent company would receive a subsidy for the use of their property. They would still keep the physical market as it is, but would offer an online market that would have some kind of paywall to get through. This would create an online library that could house eBooks, music, movies, etc. My point is that we live in a world where this is possible and not only possible easy to setup. History has shown us over and over again how this story is going to end. It’s a matter of who is brave enough to stand up and make it work. It’s worth noting that so far the only thing of this nature we currently have is Apple’s iTunes. It’s also worth noting that currently Apple is worth more than $500,000,000,000.00. Think about if it really was a one stop shop for all media. That could be an extremely large number.