Defend this Infringement
Monday, April 21st, 2008 by Patrick Ross"I… find if frustrating that so often, people see the internet as a
movable feast, the assumption being that 'a little infringement'
doesn't do any harm, but it does."
So says a blogging graphic artist with immonen illustrations inc., which has worked with such studios and comics publishers as Warner Bros. Entertainment, The Walt Disney Company, Marvel Entertainment and DC Comics. In other words, Kathryn and Stuart Immomen are good. They have a friend in the business, Darren, who has over the years interviewed many graphic artists and displayed some of their works. But Darren and the other infringement victims in the book, like many of us, would find it difficult to launch an uphill infringement suit against a company in Hong Kong that downloads an entire library of graphic works, republishes them in book form for $100 (complete with a DVD of the downloaded graphics!) and sells them under a fake ISBN.
Why was this work infringed? Well, obviously this Chinese "publishing company" thought they could make money off of these works, as long as they didn't have to pay for the rights to them to begin with. So they viewed the works as having economic value, which clearly they do. But regardless of their resale value in the print publishing market, they are the original creations of an artist, who has the right to determine how those works will be used. The Chinese publisher obviously didn't ask first.
This is commercial infringement, and it's likely that some of the 2.0 types who condone unauthorized uploading and downloading of copyrighted materials will say that is wrong. But they'll then turn around and say file-sharing is okay, because the problem is with the business model of the creator and her distributor, and they should just accept the trading of files. They go so far as to say the file-trading is a good thing, because it's spurring change. They definitely don't say the infringement — and that's what it is — should stop.
I don't know how many $100 books this Hong Kong publisher will sell of Luc's books. I can bet, however, that it will be far less than the number of unauthorized copies of the average song or movie that will be distributed on unauthorized P2P. In both cases, a copyright owner's work was taken, without permission, and without possibility of monetary return. To pretend there is a difference is to choose to live in a rationalizing delusion.
I hope, through trade agreements, treaties and diplomatic exchanges, that we can reduce the level of commercial piracy in many nations around the world, including China. I further hope that at least some of the infringers of copyrighted works through protocols such as BitTorrent will start to see that their actions individually harm artists, and collectively harm our economy and the very industries creating the works they most want to obtain.
NOTE TO READERS: I have corrected the name of the infringement victim above to Darren.
