Think I can’t tie those three subjects together? Think again. And I won’t do it by suggesting the Cards stole the identity of a championship team, because they won the NFC fair and square. Anyone who watched their three playoff games — their sturdy and opportunistic defense, their poised and experienced quarterback, their gifted and humble wide receiver, their tough and talented running backs — saw that they deserve to play in two weeks in the Super Bowl.

No, I’m writing today about my ongoing crusade for the rights of artists, one some of my critics have suggested is quixotic. Why won’t I admit that technology has changed everything? It is blindingly simple to violate a creator’s rights with the awesome replication and distribution tools available to anyone online. If you can do it, you should do it, so we need to forfeit the rights of artists, which give them incentive to create, and find some other way to compensate them for creating what we have a right to own, copy and distribute.

Sigh.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Just because technology can enable something doesn’t mean it’s good to take advantage of that new ability. Oh, an occasional law professor will say that unauthorized file sharing is wrong, but then he’ll say since everyone is doing it we might as well let it happen. Odd logic, indeed. To quote my grandmother, “if everyone put peanuts up their nose, would you?”

It’s not that simple. We can’t simply surrender to technology. Technology makes it very easy to steal another’s identity. But if I get into a little financial trouble — easy to do in this economy — should I fire up a browser steal the identity of someone with good credit, say a law professor?

The answer is an obvious no. None of us wants to end up like the guy in the identity theft commercial, singing in a pirate costume and selling fish to tourists in T-shirts.

Okay, so where do the Cards fit in? Well, I grew up in Glendale, Arizona, home of University of Phoenix Stadium (no, that accredited online school does not have a football team) and the Arizona Cardinals. Now I must confess, the Cardinals moved to the Valley of the Sun when I was out of state in college. I grew up rooting for the only major pro team in town, the Phoenix Suns of the NBA, and as far as the NFL goes, while I was a huge fan, I tended to root for AFC teams. But I have pride in the community of my roots, and when the Cardinals moved to Tempe, I became a fan.

For what that’s worth.

The Cardinals, as most people know, don’t win. They didn’t win for decades in St. Louis. They won occasionally in Chicago in the 30′s and 40′s when the sport was nascent; I don’t remember that time for obvious reasons. No, every off-season things would seemingly go great. They’d have high draft picks and select promising rookies. They’d land a prominent free agent, but usually one past his prime (think Emmitt Smith; players reaching their prime used free agency to leave the Cards). Then they’d start the season, on the road — it was too hot to play home games in September in Sun Devil Stadium, where they played most of their time in Arizona before getting a domed stadium — so before you knew it they’d be 1-4 and looking up at their NFC East foes (their division for most of their time in Arizona, teams several time zones away).

I have had a hard time seeing their games in the 20 years I’ve lived in D.C.; the Cardinals aren’t exactly in the national game-of-the-week a lot. They’ve only had about two winning seasons the two-plus decades they’ve been in the desert. But like a Chicago Cubs fan — the only major sports franchise to have gone longer without a championship — a Cards fan knows there’s always next year.

And that’s how I approach the ongoing efforts for artists’ rights. Those law professors describe this debate as a “war.” But wars force people to pick one of two opposing sides. There’s no middle ground, no opportunity for nuance in the debate. Wars generally have an end; even the Hundred Years War ended. The struggle to preserve artists’ rights is not a war.

It’s like a professional sport. There are new seasons every year.

If this were a war, artists would have won a few years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that P2P sites could be found guilty of “inducing” infringement, even if it was the users of their networks doing the infringing. From a legal standpoint, this was like Waterloo and file-sharers were like Napoleon’s army. But file-sharing continues, entrepreneurs continue to roll out products and services that they think sufficiently skirt the law (ridiculously violating the law’s intent), and law suits continue. Artists won the Super Bowl with the Grokster decision, but then they had to come back the next season, and everyone started out 0-0.

Like the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball and NASCAR (Copyright Alliance members), the struggle for artists’ rights begins a new season with regularity. And the Cardinals begin a new season every year. This year fans had real reason to be optimistic, and the team dubbed every off-season the “Team of Destiny” by sportswriter Norman Chad is in fact a Team of Destiny, and is having a Grokster-like year. (I guarantee that sentence has never before been typed by anyone, anywhere, and likely never will be again, except by a contrarian looking to prove me wrong.)

So two weeks from now I’ll take a few hours off from my crusade for artists to cheer on my Cards, with my family by my side. My son will be wearing his new Larry Fitzgerald home jersey. We’ll see Pittsburgh Steelers fans waving their yellow Terrible Towels, but we’ll be waving our white Mildly Annoying Towels (things are a bit more polite out West).

And I’ll revel in the Cardinals even being in the game as NFC champions, and will be ecstatic if they actually win. But I’ll know that next year — as the New York Giants learned last week — the Cardinals will have to start rolling that boulder up the hill all over again. And after I turn off the TV, I’ll have to start rolling my own boulder up the hill all over again.

That’s okay. If Kurt Warner can lead another team to a Super Bowl at age 37, I can give a few speeches and write a few blogs at 41.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 2:10 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, internet, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.