WebMink
Simon Phipps's personal commentary

On copyright

Sitting now in a session at the CTI Conference at the Danish Technical University near Copenhagen where presenters from various interest groups are educating us on the problem of copyright violation on music and movies. We've heard from

• Morten Madsen of the Danish Musician's Union, who is pleased that copyright infringement is treated as theft under Danish law because that means fans of his members can be sent to prison for three years, and he hopes that the shift to a six year maximum sentence will also carry.
• We've heard from Jesper Bang Olesen how the reason why all culture should be policed and restrained is because there are too many rights holders for each performance to be able to allow it to be traditionally consumed and appreciated in the new media - we have to sort out how to recognise theose rights before we can be allowed to enjoy the music again.
• We've heard from Else Helland of Johan Schlüter, the Danish music industry's enforcement law firm, how because they can't effectively pursue the big criminals they have instead decided to treat the ordinary citizen as the real criminal.

At no point has anyone up to now mentioned culture, either its appreciation now by people or its cherishing by future generations.

Finally Christopher May has stood up and made some points in the opposite direction - thank goodness. He said that the problem with the whole discussion of copyright is that it considers the private rights of the enforcers and forgets that copyright is the limited grant of rights to individuals in return for the enrichment of the public.

In the discussion, I repeated David Weinberger's point about 'leeway' - that all the real rights we enjoy may be found in the acts of discretion on the periphery of the law ("you may download that file because you are a music fan, but you may not becuase you intend to defraud me"). Leeway can't readily be expressed digitally, so it's completely missing from all the DRM schemes considered to date. Another point made by richard Hawkins was that the need in the case of those wishing to ruthlessly enforce rights is to prove that harm is being done. He suggested that the only reason it looks like the music industry is in decline is that it had an unrealistic period of growth as it re-sold music people already owned during the introduction of CDs. With that bubble normalised out, he asserted that actually the music industry is seeing reasonable straight-line growth and thus all the hatred of fans who use digital means is misplaced and does way more harm than good.

In all this the panellists seemed not to hear. They were surprised the audience applauded those who criticised them; they continued to repeat dead party-lines and didn't respond to genuine and insightful points. All very depressing and a bad omen for the future of the debate.

posted at 11:13 AM (UK) | |