Here’s a recent piece of prose from an accomplished writer, Cory Doctorow:

The Internet’s a single wire that delivers freedom of speech, of assembly and of the press — it’s a conduit for civic engagement, health care, employment, education, distant family, love and life. Disconnecting people from the Internet on the basis of an unsubstantiated accusation, without a court order, without a chance to defend yourself against your accusers, without a chance to see and challenge the evidence — it’s positively medieval.

Agreed.

Well, I think the “medieval” reference is a bit of hyperbole, we’re not talking about plagues and trebuchets. But the real problem is, what Mr. Doctorow is setting up here is a straw man. Under any scenario involving copyright owners and Internet service providers working together to reduce infringement, any accusation would be substantiated. Copyright owners are not going to throw darts at a wall scrawled with IP addresses and report those unfortunate ones poked to an ISP. No, they will focus on the few that seem to be egregiously infringing and report those. No reason to raise the ire of an ISP, thus discouraging it from cooperating fully in the future.

Also, it is false to say an accused customer has no opportunity to respond to the accusations. In fact, each time an ISP reaches out to a customer, it is so the customer can dispute the accusation. An ISP customer presumably not hard to reach, as the ISP will have customer contact information (billing, perhaps?) and the customer has an incentive to be reached regarding security risks, etc. The customer will have wide latitude to justify the bandwidth usage that appears suspicious, and it is in the self-interest of the ISP to listen to the customer because they are not in the business of cutting off paying customers.

Let us also note that this process involves being approached not once, not twice, but for three instances of suspicion of mass infringement. What are the odds of a non-infringer being suspected of infringement three times and being unable to justify their suspicious broadband use three times? I think highly low indeed, but I trust that if that case should arise, the Electronic Frontier Foundation would be lightning quick to provide free legal counsel. In fact, they will be actively searching for just such an alleged victim.

Now Mr. Doctorow has turned his attention to a case in Ireland. The ISP issue, frankly, is more front-and-center in Europe right now because policymakers in various countries have been examining the possibility of mandating ISPs — with varying levels of emphasis — to cooperate with copyright owners on reducing infringement. In the free market that is the United States, the debate has rather been about voluntary cooperation. That is where we need to keep the debate, because a government mandate is another straw man in this country.

I have a great deal of respect for what Mr. Doctorow has accomplished as a writer. I am the son of an accomplished novelist but I have never had one published myself, so my hat is off to him. While his style of fiction is not my cup of tea, I know he has done well for himself, and has chosen to promote sharing of his work.

That said, Mr. Doctorow makes a choice regarding his copyright, namely, he chooses to forfeit some of them through a Creative Commons process. Note the word choice. Copyright means that a creator of works is not obligated to hand over his or her work to the masses on their terms. The creator may choose not to distribute it at all (rare for one that might have market appeal) or to distribute it more conventionally, i.e., without authorizing sharing. It is unfortunate when a creator who chooses to forfeit his rights expresses indignation at other creators who seek simply to ensure theirs are enforced.

Share this:

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 9:08 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under blogging, copyright law, copyright opponents, creators, internet, network neutrality, piracy, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.