There is Hope After All
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by Patrick Ross
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It never ceases to amaze me how there could be objections to the efforts of Congress to encourage colleges and universities to enforce the law on their campuses while educating — yes, educating at educational institutions — their students on the law, and hopefully what is right and what is wrong. We all know many colleges and universities were already making great strides in that area, yet higher education lobbyists still complain.
Well, it isn’t just some universities that recognize the dangers of piracy. Some students do as well, such as Adam Roberts of the U. of Arkansas. Mr. Roberts believes strongly in the importance of students being heard by administrators, as he recently noted in the school’s Arkansas Traveler. One message he’d like them to hear is that piracy is wrong:
One in three college students download copyrighted material illegally, according to the University of Richmond.
There’s really no excuse for this. There are plenty of affordable, legal ways to download and stream media. iTunes, Napster, Netflix Watch Now and Hulu.com are just a few of the most popular methods. If you can’t afford 99 cents a song, you probably should be doing something more profitable with your time than downloading music.
Pirates don’t just hurt artists and the people who finance and market the works we enjoy, but they hurt all of us law-abiding consumers, as well. Illegal file sharing is the reason we have restrictive digital rights management on our software and songs and part of the reason why prices are so expensive at theater concession stands and we have to sit through 10 minutes of commercials.
American companies lose billions of dollars every year because of Internet piracy, which costs tens of thousands of jobs.
And I’ve certainly tangled with these well-funded groups:
Some pirates aren’t content with their own thefts, and they have started lobbying groups bent on severely restricting or even eliminating copyright protection laws. There’s a lot of legitimate debate about the nuances of intellectual property laws, such as the boundaries of fair use or the length of copyright extensions. But ending copyrights altogether would have horrible moral and practical consequences.
If I have a criticism with his piece, it is that he focuses on the fact that artists should be paid. When their work is stolen, they should. But of course this feeds into the absurd argument that if we had a compulsory license funded by, say, an ISP tax, that we could steal to our heart’s content but no longer feel guilty about it because we’d know recording artists (and hopefully songwriters and music publishers) would be getting token payments.
The problem is, that requires creators forfeit their rights and put themselves in the hands of others, people and organizations who may not have their best interests at heart. That is unacceptable.
Of course, Mr. Roberts’ primary goals here are to 1) discourage his classmates from stealing creative works such as sound recordings and motion pictures and 2) encourage his university to continue clamping down on such activity. He doesn’t need a complicated treatise on rights to get that message across. In fact, he seems to have gotten it across quite well.
