Copy music, destroy civilization
I “google” myself occasionally. That is, I enter my own name into the popular Internet search engine, perhaps on a monthly basis, to see if I’m becoming a famous writer (not yet, I’m afraid).
Until recently I did it just because I am vain, but this spring I discovered a new reason for doing it, and frequently. That’s when I found my name on the website of a print magazine I had never heard of, along with the description of an article I had written for Human Events in January about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
This magazine, as it turned out, had stolen my article, printed it in their pages, and then mailed it out to their subscribers as if I or Human Events had given permission, which was not the case. Even worse, a Nexis search of this publication’s name revealed allegations against it of anti-Semitism. I did not bother to investigate the claims–even a perceived association like that can be death for a young conservative writer.
At my request the editor removed my name from the website and agreed not to steal my articles again. I don’t think my career will suffer from that episode, but it did make me think about the importance of respect for intellectual property.
The discussion of intellectual property nowadays is dominated by the theft of music on the Internet. I believe strongly that the practice is immoral–that the proliferation of easy electronic means for it is no excuse, and that people who do it should go to prison just like any teenaged shoplifter at Sam Goody.
Try selling that argument to a college student–even the most upstanding, pious kid you find praying at the Notre Dame’s Grotto–and you will hear a litany of excuses: “The money doesn’t go to the artists anyway.” “Big record companies don’t need such a large profit.” Such arguments could justify almost any crime, and self-rationalization is always deaf to reason.
But there are more legitimate concerns about IP law. In its efforts to undermine the means of electronic music theft, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has initiated lawsuits to ban search engines that can also be used for perfectly legitimate file-sharing purposes. Courts have decided that some are legal, while others–Napster, for example–do not pass muster, simply based on perceptions of whether they are meant to foster piracy.
So now the government is going to decide what properties a search engine can have, and what it can and cannot look for? Yikes! It’s enough to make a good conservative want to toss the whole area of law out the window.
Property Rights
But this would be a huge mistake. Intellectual property theft, like all theft, represents an attack not just on the victim but on civilization itself.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that man’s unalienable rights, which come from God, include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He was taking his cue from the philosopher John Locke, who wrote instead of “life, liberty, and property”–similar ideas, since “the pursuit of happiness” must surely include the right to enjoy the fruit of one’s own labors.
Neither the Founders nor Locke chose these principles at random. There can be no societal development or human achievement if everyone lives with a constant and legitimate fear of being brutally murdered, or of having the work of their hands seized by force.
When men first abandoned the nomadic life for agriculture, they did so only because they felt some confidence they would be able to harvest and eat them. Without this confidence, tilling and sowing would be a waste of time and effort–someone would just steal the crops anyway. They would have been forced back into hunting and gathering, living in fear of starvation–a condition in which society remains stunted and primitive.
Conversely, if property rights are respected, society can move into agriculture and well beyond. If property is respected sufficiently, man can even develop a society like ours, in which we are so unworried by basic needs that we can widely enjoy such superfluities as cable television, gourmet pet food, and entire websites (not making this up) devoted to photographs of discarded mattresses and “Bad Sideburns.” More importantly, we enjoy amazing convenience, remarkable works of art and architecture, and an economy that sustains millions, with even the poorest among us literate and well fed.
The lesson is that society flourishes to the extent that property rights are respected, and stagnates or declines to the extent that they are not. Hence the proper role of government as sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution–as the defender of those unalienable rights, including property rights. This view steers the middle course between the vicious extremes of anarchy–which creates such fear that societal development is hindered or stopped altogether–and totalitarianism, which actively undermines property rights with the same effect.
The Work of Our Hands and Minds
Intellectual property is no different from property in its other forms, and there are no excuses for its theft. Perhaps record companies do exploit artists, but they only exist because musicians know they usually cannot make a living without them. The artists need someone with the money and infrastructure to distribute and promote their work. If students’ theft puts these evil, greedy companies out of business, musicians will have to find other jobs to sustain themselves (in some cases, maybe it’s not a bad thing).
The loss of intellectual property rights won’t cast us immediately into the Stone Age, but it is unjust, and it will certainly diminish the cultural richness and creativity of our society. If every newspaper in the country could publish my articles for free without permission (not to say they would want to), Human Events would have no reason to pay me. If such disrespect for writers’ creations were sufficiently widespread, we would lose our independent press, vital to our nation’s health, along with our creative authors and artists. No one will pay for what is available for free, and so writers all over the country might be forced into janitorial or construction work–or even worse, public relations.
I admit to some amusement at the idea of Britney Spears as a street-sweeper–if only because she would probably have to wear the clothes of that profession. But widespread intellectual property theft will also kill off the greatest of man’s great creations.
There was once a writer who felt threatened enough by the theft of his intellectual property that he dedicated a chapter in a novel to highlighting and lampooning the practice. The book was Nicholas Nickelby; the writer, Charles Dickens. Fortunately, the MP3 pirates of his time failed to drive him into another line of work.
Think twice before indulging in free music or other forms of stolen intellectual property. “Free stuff” always comes at a terrible price.
David Freddoso, Assistant Editor for Human Events, writes for Brainwash.
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9 Comments - add your own
Patrick — December 7, 2003 at 10:05 pm
The Constitution explains what copyright is for, “To promote the progress of science and useful arts.” And there was a limit on how long the owner had exclusive control (14 years or so originally?), which has since become unlimited. The result of it becoming unlimited is a complete disrespect for the whole system which protects intellectual property. It’s absurd to put someone who freely distributes Chesterton’s ‘Outline of Sanity’ (1926) in the same category as a shoplifter. Yes, I can quite easily rationalize that one away. And no, it does not diminish the cultural richness and creativity of our society to make the ‘Outline of Sanity’ more readily available.
David F. — December 8, 2003 at 11:23 am
I don’t disagree with you about the issue of reasonable time limits. In most cases here, though, we’re talking about less than a year or two.
Daniel — December 8, 2003 at 2:23 pm
It is about as bizarre to think that there should be a time-limit on intellectual property as to think that you should lose your house or book collection after 14 years, 70 years, or whatever.
The US Constitution doesn’t represent the foundation of copyright. The actual foundation is in the notion of contracts. When a creator declares a copyright, she is declaring that she will allow you to experience her work if you will respect limits on copying. If you don’t like those conditions, then don’t consume her work.
There is no reason why a creator’s sharing-contract should ever be forced to expire, nor why something sharable should cease to be subject to such contracts because of nothing other than the passage of time!
What the US Constitution did was to assign responsibility for copyrights to the federal government. Frankly, this was badly done, because there was therein a palpable confusion of copyrights with patents.
Unlike copyrights, patents constrain independent creation. This is unjust and economically inefficient. Given that we have patents (as a “second best”), they should have finite life; but it would be better to replace them with copyrights.
Harry — December 8, 2003 at 3:04 pm
There is a fundamental difference between most forms of ‘property’ and ‘information’. The former cannot be duplicated easily whereas the latter can be duplicated easily.
Copying someone’s intellectual ‘creation’ is not ’stealing’ it. It is COPYING IT!
There is a big difference between stealing and copying - which the article above does not seem to appreciate.
In my humble opinion, copyrights for literary or artistic works should extend no longer than three years.
e.g. see …
http://www.angryharry.com/esRidiculousCopyrightLaws.htm
Nick — December 8, 2003 at 5:55 pm
The problem is that the ownership of the I.P. or Patent is granted by government. And as we’ve seen with many technology patents over the last decade, the U.S.P.O. does not have employees qualified to review and grant these patents. The Eolas case currently being appealed by MS and under re-examination by the P.O. is the latest and most extreme case yet. It should have never even made it through the review process but somehow, it got approved. Even if it is overturned or invalidated next year (it probably will be), it will not be in time to prevent the changes software companies are making to their products to keep from incurring additional licensing fees (extortion money) in case this invalid patent is allowed to stand. With all the wasted man hours, a certain amount of irreversible damage has already been done. Of course, if the patent does stand, it will realistically be the beginning of the end of legal, technological innovation.
The real debate is… what is more damaging to innovation… the ability to patent or own extremely general concepts and ideas?… or no patents at all?
A though provoking article on I.P. http://reason.com/0303/fe.dc.creation.shtml
Ophis — December 10, 2003 at 12:04 am
There is a big difference between stealing a disk in a record store and copying an MP3 from an online source. The disk is a scarce resource, not everyone can have one. The MP3 can be copied to everyone without anyone loosing her copy. The fact that there is near-unanimous agreement on the need for copyrights to “expire” shows the inconsistency of the underlying pro-IP arguments.
This said, what the author is actually afraid of is losing his source of income (a legitimate fear). However, there are means to provide compensation to authors and inventors that don’t rely on anti-progressive laws like Patents and Copyrights laws. Technology has made information cheaper and more accessible; we need to embrace this and change our revenue models so that they don’t rely on artificial scarcity.
Using government force to protect one’s work is very convenient for authors but it doesn’t make the practice right and even less so moral. The transition doesn’t have to be that painful if the publishing industry looks for ways to embrace technology (digital signatures could be a good place to start looking for example) instead of rejecting it.
Don’t let yourself get brainwashed by false parrallels between ideas and physical property.
Daniel — December 10, 2003 at 3:18 pm
Ophis, you are refusing to acknowledge the point that a copyright is a contractual condition (as distinct from a patent, which is indeed merely a creature of the State). The author agrees to share on condition that the consumer’s copying be limited in various ways.
Further, while an instantiation of the work is not intrinsically what you (rather loosely) call “scarce”, creative works themselves are, which is exactly why instantiations of copyright works are made, as opposed to instantiations of works which are either not copyright or copyright by the consumer.
PJ Doland — December 11, 2003 at 4:44 pm
It’s funny that you would invoke Jefferson in defense of intellectual property. He actually wrote the following:
“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively posess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. That ideas should spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevelolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expandable over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
Joe Jackson — March 13, 2004 at 8:56 pm
“Intellectual property is no different from property in its other forms, and there are no excuses for its theft.”
Twaddle.
You cannot steal ideas, because nothing is ever taken away. You can only share them. Also, you can’t put ideas in a wheelbarrow
I don’t expect the man who built my house to act like he owns it, I don’t expect the people who write/sing/whatever for my education and entertainment to tell me how to use what I have bought from them.
I agree, once property rights are protected, then society can move on. i.e. Once I have purchased, it’s mine to use however I see fit. The only hardship this would cause an artist/writer is if they cannot keep producing the goods.
If that is the case, then they should get another job and contribute to our joint well being in another way.