Craig Brozefsky on Fri, 12 May 2000 10:32:24 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] Significance of Napster Greatly Exaggerated |
Bruce Peren's recently posted an editorial on his Technocrats site titles "Music Bootlegging with Napster Hurts Free Software" where he rails against the 330,000 some users of Napster who were caught trading copyrighted Metallica tunes, accusing them of bringing down a totalitarian intellectual property regime which will destroy the Free Software movement. The conflict is rooted in Bruce's insistence upon some form of legal protection for intellectual property. His argument supporting this position depends upon us granting him his wish that proprietary and free software peacefully co-exist: "I believe that free software and proprietary software should peacefully coexist. But if you grant that proprietary intellectual property has a right to exist at all, some legal protection like copyright becomes necessary." Free Software, in particular the GPL, takes advantage of the current copyright regime, but does not depend upon it's existence at all. If copyright went away, then the GPL would no longer be needed. Bruce proposes a balance dependent upon the interpretation and execution of copyright law with public interest on one side, and the interests of the IP owners on the other. Such a balance sounds nice, but when one considers who, or rather what, the largest owners and exploiters of intellectual property are, and the control which they exert over the legal and judicial systems, we see that any balance would be unstable and virtually guaranteed to degenerate into something like the present situation with the DMCA and UCITA. It is this tendency which Bruce fears, because it narrows the space within which Free Software can operate. Bruce's personal dedication to Free Software makes this threat a serious issue for him. The problem I have with Bruce's argument is that because he is unwilling to look at the real cause of the problem, the intellectual property regime in general, he is instead forced to find a scape goat. Something is needed to explain why the IP regime is failing to consider the needs of users, something external the IP regime, because he insists that the regime itself must be preserved. So along come 330k kids swapping heavy metal and it's obvious that THESE are the reason why the copyright regime threatens to destroy Free Software's ability to "compete" in the software market: "But in this case the 330,000 kids are stealing, and the popularity of this form of theft won't ever make it right. The kids, and their parents, should be pursued. The people who make Napster, by taking no stand against having their products used for bootlegging, have made themselves accomplices." If we forget our history and accept Bruce's faulty causal argument we may well conclude that mp3 traders and software pyrates (say it with pride muthafucka), do indeed serve as anecdotal evidence in support of the IP industries position. But any sustained examination of the economic losses they incur reveals that these losses are largely imaginary. Stuck with a need for a fall guy, Bruce has to legitimize a faulty argument that his real opponents deploy daily. This does not seem to be a sound strategy. Let us examine history tho. The DMCA grew out of the WIPO Copyright Treaty which was ratified in December of 1996. The "Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act"(S.505) has direct roots back to S.483 in 1995. MP3.com was not incorporated until March of 1998, and Napster came even later (it originated out of Shawn Fanning's frustration with mp3.com and other mp3 search engines). So it seems that the most egregious legal attacks on the interests of the public started years before there was any considerable level of mp3 bootlegging taking place online. The assertion that Napster bootlegging hurts Free Software has no basis in historical fact. -- Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com> Free Scheme/Lisp Software http://www.red-bean.com/~craig "Hiding like thieves in the night from life, illusions of oasis making you look twice. -- Mos Def and Talib Kweli _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold