< PREVIOUS ] [ 2000 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
As the creator and distributor of some intellectual
property,
(I agree that sounds pretentious, but if it
works for Metallica, it can work for me), I've been
following the Napster case quite closely.
My technological literacy gets more antiquated with each
passing day, but as I understand it, you can take a normal
music CD, stick it in your computer, and indulge in a
process called ripping.
That converts the CD's music tracks into MP3
files, which don't take up nearly as much disk space, and
can thus be more easily transmitted via the Internet.
Napster set up a central exchange for people to swap MP3 files. Many of these files represented copyrighted musical material, and so even if Napster itself wasn't violating copyright laws, it was making it easier for other people to do so.
That's what the recording industry argued in its suit against Napster, and a judge agreed, though the court order to shut the site down right away was stayed.
Meanwhile, there are similar services on the Internet, like Gnutella, whose principal difference is that Gnutella is dispersed -- there isn't one central exchange site. Indeed, many of these sites might be overseas and thus beyond the jurisdiction of American courts.
And now some clever people have found ways to break the anti-copying encryption on DVDs and compress their content, so that copying a full-length movie is not out of the question if one has a fast internet connection.
The intellectual content industry
has fought this
sort of thing before, as with the lawsuits in the 1980s
where expensive lawyers argued with a straight face that
the television industry would suffer irreparable harm if
you were allowed to use your VCR to tape a show while you
were at work so you could watch it later.
They also persuaded the federal government to require piracy-protection hardware for a device called a DAT (Digital Audio Tape), and as a result, computer users were deprived of what could have been an excellent mass-market back-up storage system.
So there's no question that the industry has some clout in Washington, and I have an idea what we might expect, no matter whether it wins or loses the Napster case.
First, they'll need to pay Congress to make copyright infringement a criminal, rather than a civil, matter. As it is, if somebody starts circulating one of my columns without my permission, I've got to find him, and engage a lawyer to sue him, and persuade a court that I've been damaged, and if I succeed, try to collect a judgment. As you might suspect, that's so much trouble that I wouldn't bother.
But once it's a federal crime, rather than a civil tort, then the intellectual property owner can just report the crime to the feds, which should be able to take it from there with a couple of new agencies, like the Copyright Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Audio Tapes and Videos.
Finding all the violators might be a problem, but the feds already have a device called Carnivore, which it can attach to the computers used by your Internet Service Provider. Carnivore scans everything that goes through the computers, and so it could certainly tell whether you were transferring copyrighted material in violation of the new federal law against possession or sale of such material.
Armed with this almost irrefutable evidence, federal agents from the CEA or BATV could then come to your home or office and seize your computer, and maybe your house, too, since it might have been purchased with the proceeds of copyright infringement, and it was certainly the premises where crime was allowed to flourish.
To reduce this crime, it wouldn't hurt to register all hard-disk drives, CD burners, VCRs, xerographic copy machines, scanners and the like -- law-abiding citizens would have nothing to fear, of course.
Copyright infringers aren't likely to be violent criminals, but why take a chance? A mandatory minimum of at least five years of hard time would send the message that America is serious about fighting crime, and it would continue the current prison-construction binge that so helps our economy.
And for those overseas criminal sites that might otherwise escape, we can negotiate military-assistance pacts with their host nations, and send in bombers and helicopters to eliminate this scourge from the face of the earth.
As we all know, these strategies have worked well to eliminate guns and drugs, and as the owner of some intellectual property, I can barely contain my excitement at the prospect of a serious crackdown on the scofflaws who infringe on copyrights.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2000 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >