Intellectual Property, school, and blood

09 Feb 2009

Three important things have taken place in the last 24 hours. In reverse chronological order, I received an AWESOME Red Cross ID card in the mail that has my name and blood type and such AWESOME information, I had the first day of second semester, and I had some revelations about intellectual property.

The blood card doesn’t really need any further description. The first day of school went well. It was great to be back and see a lot of people I hadn’t seen in a long time. This is looking to be a fabulous semester; I have great classes.

Intellectual property, however, is a tricky topic. For a long time, I’ve been strongly of the opinion that it was permissible to pirate music (although I didn’t download for purely practical reasons [I just swapped with other people]) because the money that I spent on music did not go to the artists anyway, and I felt that I was listening to the music for the purpose of learning more about what I liked, and then buying tickets to shows and buying merchandise for my favorite groups, thus providing them with income down the line. I still believe that this is a good way to get money to artists, and support them. But a lot has changed since I initially formed these opinions. The Internet has evolved a great deal, giving artists a meaningful way to distribute their music to people without having record labels getting in the way of their profit. The Internet brings consumers closer to the suppliers, which is a potentially mutually beneficial arrangement.

So since this has happened, I now no longer have a method for justifying pirating music. I am in fact now stealing money. As much as we might like to consider ourselves Robin Hoods who steal from the rich for the sake of the comparatively poor (us), we are stealing, and that is wrong. Ultimately, if an artist expects to make money because they believe X number of people will purchase their music, and then half of those people just pirate it, they have lost half their money. There is no way around that.

Given all this, I run into problems. I have always strongly morally opposed DRM (digital rights management), because I think that people have the right to do what they want with music they own. The concept of intellectual property is that you are buying the right to use this music however you want. But you can’t just do whatever with it. There are laws and morals. You can’t argue that you should have the right to distribute that music to twenty other people (or just one) because that is illegal and wrong. So what is the issue with DRM? Why does, for instance, iTunes’ five-computer-per-account limit violate our rights as consumers? I mean, in an ideal world you wouldn’t need this protection because no one would be stealing the music. But the companies have a moral and legal right to impose protection in the name of preventing consumers from stealing the music.

My friend and I were arguing about this today, and it seems that the central conflict is in determining whether the duty the distributor of the music owes to the consumers or the artists is stronger. While I agree that we, the consumers, have a right to do what we want with the music, there has to be some give. What if someone has six personal computers that they want to use the music on? iTunes only allows five, so one gets left out. Is the five computer limit reasonable? Well, we have to weigh the potential inconvenience to consumers (or the infringement of their rights as the owner of the music) against the potential that removing or loosening such restrictions would do significant damage to the artists. Certainly the iTunes restrictions can be overkill and keep people from performing legitimate activities, but they definitely avoid a lot illegalities in the first place. If we were to remove all such restrictions and place the burden of enforcing this type of law on the government, it would never work. What governmental agency would have enough time or resources to prosecute everyone who violated these laws? It would be like trying to find the source of a chain email. The Internet is too big and too fast. The only thing that can stop this illegality is restriction of the content in the first place.

So while the technology for creating effective DRM does not exist or has not yet been implemented, I do think I support it in theory. For the moment, is it better to live with what we have? That is a difficult question. But I think Apple’s recent announcement of moving away from DRM is in their and our best interest. Ultimately, they are going to have the last laugh; they have ultimate control over the material, so when a better DRM technology comes along, they’ll take it. As a publicly owned and traded company, Apple is subject to public sentiment, so we, the people, need to make sure that we make a conscious effort to work towards more meaningful DRM in the future in the form of legislation and social change. If we demonstrate that we can be trusted with music, companies will be able to provide us with goods and services that reflect our ability to behave honestly in a relaxed system.

Until then, we might just have to tough it out and keep our eyes on the prize.